Two playthroughs - Indepth combat and leveling FB - 18/09/16 02:30 PM
I normally don't bother posting any feedback or suggestions on gaming sites, as I pretty much expect it to either be ignored due to lack of commitment from the designers, or drowned in a sea of a large playerbase.
I am making an exception to Larian, because of their decision to make D:OS EE, even though they didn't have to. It might be a smart longterm strategic move, but that doesn't change the fact it sends a strong signal from a company that they care about more than just money.
But that's enough backscratching for now.
I wanted to make a more indept post centered around combat and leveling, after having completed two playthroughs both as a Red Prince, and as a custom Elf (fighter and knight respectively). The reason for that is that a strong combat and leveling system is, at least for someone like myself, the very backbone of replayability.
So let's skip right to the beginning.
Character creation:
Four races (species?) is obviously harder to balance than one, and the fifth race is still on the drawing board. In order to make each race unique and distinct from each other, each of them have an active racial skill and two racial passives.
The idea is really good, but the execution does need some tweaking. Since D:OS2 uses intelligence, dexterity and strength based weapons, having each class get a bonus to either actually restricts build options. It's not a huge deal, but as a min-maxer, having those +2 finesse on my warrior sticks out like a sore thumb. And how does +1 sneak help a dwarven mage on the battlefield?
Try not to pigeonhole the races into specific classes. Give them boni to attributes that are more universal, such as constitution and memory. That allows for more freedom with fewer drawbacks. Alternatively, add more value to said stats when using non-compatible weapons. Perhaps add weapons that scale 50/50 off two stats?
The active racial abilities are in general pretty nice, and makes each race unique. The problem at the moment, is balance.
Lizards racial ability is a breath of fire that scorces the ground. Sounds fun, but it has too low range to be useful on a mage, and does too little damage on a warrior. A battlemage with high pyromancy might get some uses out of it, though i doubt it. If the battlemage lizard fantasy is to be pushed though, then this ability could serve as an ability that shreds both armor and magic armor. Very few attacks does that, but plenty of attacks does fire dmg in an aoe.
The elven one is insane. More AP and damage per round at the cost of HP is every glass cannons dream. I really feel like much of it's power comes from the combination with the talents Warlord and the warfare skill Rage though.. (more on that later).
Human one is Encourage from D:OS1. It's very good but considering its range, application, cost and duration it is a 'fire and forget' spell that targets your entire team pretty much for the duration of the entire fight. It's just too convenient and universal. Very little strategy required. Heck, because of how stats and health work, activating it actually serves as an AOE heal. Consider making it singletarget. Perhaps give it a minor armor/magic armor regen effect, as those effects seem pretty scarse at the moment.
The dwarven one is the one I've tinkered around with the least (on 3rd playthrough atm to test it out some more) but it seems quite useful without being overpowered.
Attributes and requirements
At first I was very excited when i was in the character creation screen and saw that each point into strength for my knight added a solid 15% dmg to melee attack damage and associated skills. Once I realized that each level actually divided that bonus by the level number, my excitement quickly faded. At level 7, each point added a minuscule 2.5%. Too low for me to bother with, when each point into constitution seemed to scale much better (most levels would give a solid 7-10% hp per point), or memory allowing me to learn new abilities (Useful considering the cooldown of most abilities are 3 rounds or more).
On top of that, each level lowers your baseline damage, requiring more points invested into your mainstat just to 'sustain' your damage bonus. From a design perspective, I can see its merits. From a player perspective, this feels like regression instead of progression. My first character eventually gave up trying to keep up with the curve, since he needed more hp and skills. My second ignored mainstat completely, which was totally viable since items and skills have no requirement other than the initial point invested into the prerequisite skill tree. So my level 7 elf knight with 10 strength did -27% dmg with skills, but those 12 points of constitution almost doubled my HP even after using blood ritual (which negated the dmg penalty... see where I am going with this?)
This system is in dire need of change. Remove the character damage baseline regression. Make each point a flat % bonus per point. Just make them additive, so that each point spent is less effective than the precious one, without making the player feeling like they are taking 2 steps backwards.
Consider adding stat requirements into the game. The D1 system where higher level weapons that had not had their requirements met, could still be wielded with a penalty was an excellent one in my opinion.
Memory is an excellent addition to the game. Do you want to specialize, or be a jack of all trades? Picking memory over say, constitution is a viable choice here. Right now there are enough useful skills, and their cooldown is sufficiently long to make memory a worthy investment.
Finally, receiving 2 stat points per level feels a lot better than getting 1 every other level as we did in D:OS1.
Combat abilities and skills:
The combat abilities themselves are just extended passives, and more ways for you to customize your character. Every skill and spell requires you to invest a single point into the respective school in order to learn the skill, but other than that skills do not have requirements other than memory slots. Each point beyond the first then adds some minor bonus.
The great part of this system is that each point spent is quite unique. For example, hydrosophist increases the healing and magic armor restoration you do with your abilities, whereas necromancer heals you when you deal damage with either spells, skills or attack.
This allows you to really customize your character as you want.
The bad part is that each point is actually rather low impact. While I have no doubt that as we level further and start to stack points into a single tree, that those points can be felt, it just didn't feel very exciting to level them up. Especially the defensive ones like armor, magic armor and vitality. Yay, i just gained 1% hp.
I would see them doubled, with enemies scaling accordingly, of course.
On top of that, some are more useful than others, even for schools that are not usually associated with them. My Elf knight did so much damage that pumping necromancy to selfheal even though 90% of my playstyle evolved around Warfare, was actually better than putting points into Warfare itself. That could be justified on a hybrid, but on a pure knight that didn't use a single necromancy skill that felt a bit awkward from a design perspective.
And just to round this section off, even though this post is about combat in general, I must applaude you for the division between combat and civil abilities. I hope you keep them seperate.
Skills and spells:
All in all I am very happy about the available skills and spells in the EA. One of my biggest issues with D:OS1 was the lack of versatility and useful skills for rogues, hunters and warriors. Too much of their playstyle was about autoattacking. Even though that was partially addressed in the Enhanced Edition, D:OS2 has brought melee and bow classes up to par with mages.
First things first though: Memory slots. While most skills only require a single memory slot, some of the more powerful ones require 3. The only problem is that I have yet to find a single skill, even though I have tried most of them, where I could justify that hefty memory slot cost. On top of that, most of them require source (scarse) AND more AP to cast!
With a memory slot cost of 2, I could see myself using some of them. Right now though, they feel a bit too restrictive for my taste...
The overall balancing of the skills and spells is decent. Necromancy spells feel the weakest, but hydro, aero and pyro are all good in their own right. However...
..Hailstrike(hydro) is pretty bonkers though, doing far too much damage and cc in too big an aoe for too little AP. It's also bugged, it causes damage and cc quite a bit beyond it's range indicator.
Rage (Warfare) is so OP in it's current form that using it (especially in combination with Warlord) makes every encounter barring the EA final boss trivial. In order to justify 100% crit chance and the movespeed bonus, Rage would need to remove all armor and magic armor on you, and double damage received from all sources. Right now the drawback is non-existant.
Snipe (huntsman) is in itself pretty balanced. But with sneak, guerilla and Rage I was critting for 750 dmg at lvl 6 with a 60 dmg crossbow... Took out the voidwoken in a single hit. But those have been the only real outliers that I've found.
Talents:
I was disappointed to see so few new talents for the EA, and that many of the old ones that were underpowered, had not been buffed. When was the last time you picked Morning Person, Five Star Diner or Escapist?
At least the new talents that were included are good. Hothead, Pawn and Savage Sortilege all have their merits. Glass cannon is strong as hell again. Warlords, as mentioned a few times, is blatantly overpowered and in the same category as Rage. Even at 1 AP per kill it's still a no-brainer, unless we get other ways to manipulate the AP pool.
I really hope the talent tree is being worked on and reiterated. Talents are granted so seldom, and it would be nice to have more than 1/3 of the talents being worth choosing.
Itemization:
I would very much like to see some differences between the different types of weapons. Why should I use a sword over a club, for example? The sword could have an implicit 10% bonus chance to hit. The club could deal an extra 25% damage to armor. See what I am getting at?
Oh, and weapon switching. Can we not make that a thing, without having to spend a ton of AP and do it manually? I really want to make a huntsman/rogue hybrid, but in it's current state that is not worth it at all. A warrior could switch between 2h against enemies that have been cc'ed, and a shield when facing multiple ranged enemies he can't get to..
Speaking of shields, they are pretty shitty in their current state. Bonus armor is too low compared to the damage you're giving up compared to 2h or dualwield. Even shieldless 1h is better, since it reduces your AP per attack from 2 to 1.
Regenerating armor in combat, by that magical or physical seem very scarse. Frost armor and fortify does it, and a few consumables. To the best of my knowledge, that's about it. That severely limits the value of armor in long drawn out battles...
Combat itself:
Building on the above, if tanky characters are ever to be a thing, then they need ways to manipulate the battlefriend. Right now, offense (hard cc included here) is a much better defense than having high armor/resist/magic armor. Without taunt, there is no way besides positioning for you to redirect damage from your squishies to your tank.
Several skills should be added to address this issue. D:OS1 EE added a taunt skill, which was a good start. Other options include: Skills that allow you to support your team with massive defensive buffs based on your own level of tankyness, essentially forcing them to focus your tank before they can hope to bring down your team.
What about an aggro system based on distance to enemy, to make enemies significantly favor (but never guarantee) attacking close party members? That would favor building tanky on warriors, while rogues still have their 'get-in-get-out' shenanigans.
Wrapping it up
Combat feel more fluent than in D:OS1. AI took forever to complete it's combat, would often stall, casting multiple spells was a chore due to some innate animation cooldown period etc. It definitely feels much smoother now.
Overall, I had a highly enjoyable time playing the EA. Some changes needs to be made. Thankfully, a lot of them are just crunching numbers. Others need some revision, but very few demand an actual overhaul.
Overall I can see the potential for this game and it's combat/leveling mechanics to surpass the original.
Cheers, and see you once more content ha been added to the EA.
I am making an exception to Larian, because of their decision to make D:OS EE, even though they didn't have to. It might be a smart longterm strategic move, but that doesn't change the fact it sends a strong signal from a company that they care about more than just money.
But that's enough backscratching for now.
I wanted to make a more indept post centered around combat and leveling, after having completed two playthroughs both as a Red Prince, and as a custom Elf (fighter and knight respectively). The reason for that is that a strong combat and leveling system is, at least for someone like myself, the very backbone of replayability.
So let's skip right to the beginning.
Character creation:
Four races (species?) is obviously harder to balance than one, and the fifth race is still on the drawing board. In order to make each race unique and distinct from each other, each of them have an active racial skill and two racial passives.
The idea is really good, but the execution does need some tweaking. Since D:OS2 uses intelligence, dexterity and strength based weapons, having each class get a bonus to either actually restricts build options. It's not a huge deal, but as a min-maxer, having those +2 finesse on my warrior sticks out like a sore thumb. And how does +1 sneak help a dwarven mage on the battlefield?
Try not to pigeonhole the races into specific classes. Give them boni to attributes that are more universal, such as constitution and memory. That allows for more freedom with fewer drawbacks. Alternatively, add more value to said stats when using non-compatible weapons. Perhaps add weapons that scale 50/50 off two stats?
The active racial abilities are in general pretty nice, and makes each race unique. The problem at the moment, is balance.
Lizards racial ability is a breath of fire that scorces the ground. Sounds fun, but it has too low range to be useful on a mage, and does too little damage on a warrior. A battlemage with high pyromancy might get some uses out of it, though i doubt it. If the battlemage lizard fantasy is to be pushed though, then this ability could serve as an ability that shreds both armor and magic armor. Very few attacks does that, but plenty of attacks does fire dmg in an aoe.
The elven one is insane. More AP and damage per round at the cost of HP is every glass cannons dream. I really feel like much of it's power comes from the combination with the talents Warlord and the warfare skill Rage though.. (more on that later).
Human one is Encourage from D:OS1. It's very good but considering its range, application, cost and duration it is a 'fire and forget' spell that targets your entire team pretty much for the duration of the entire fight. It's just too convenient and universal. Very little strategy required. Heck, because of how stats and health work, activating it actually serves as an AOE heal. Consider making it singletarget. Perhaps give it a minor armor/magic armor regen effect, as those effects seem pretty scarse at the moment.
The dwarven one is the one I've tinkered around with the least (on 3rd playthrough atm to test it out some more) but it seems quite useful without being overpowered.
Attributes and requirements
At first I was very excited when i was in the character creation screen and saw that each point into strength for my knight added a solid 15% dmg to melee attack damage and associated skills. Once I realized that each level actually divided that bonus by the level number, my excitement quickly faded. At level 7, each point added a minuscule 2.5%. Too low for me to bother with, when each point into constitution seemed to scale much better (most levels would give a solid 7-10% hp per point), or memory allowing me to learn new abilities (Useful considering the cooldown of most abilities are 3 rounds or more).
On top of that, each level lowers your baseline damage, requiring more points invested into your mainstat just to 'sustain' your damage bonus. From a design perspective, I can see its merits. From a player perspective, this feels like regression instead of progression. My first character eventually gave up trying to keep up with the curve, since he needed more hp and skills. My second ignored mainstat completely, which was totally viable since items and skills have no requirement other than the initial point invested into the prerequisite skill tree. So my level 7 elf knight with 10 strength did -27% dmg with skills, but those 12 points of constitution almost doubled my HP even after using blood ritual (which negated the dmg penalty... see where I am going with this?)
This system is in dire need of change. Remove the character damage baseline regression. Make each point a flat % bonus per point. Just make them additive, so that each point spent is less effective than the precious one, without making the player feeling like they are taking 2 steps backwards.
Consider adding stat requirements into the game. The D1 system where higher level weapons that had not had their requirements met, could still be wielded with a penalty was an excellent one in my opinion.
Memory is an excellent addition to the game. Do you want to specialize, or be a jack of all trades? Picking memory over say, constitution is a viable choice here. Right now there are enough useful skills, and their cooldown is sufficiently long to make memory a worthy investment.
Finally, receiving 2 stat points per level feels a lot better than getting 1 every other level as we did in D:OS1.
Combat abilities and skills:
The combat abilities themselves are just extended passives, and more ways for you to customize your character. Every skill and spell requires you to invest a single point into the respective school in order to learn the skill, but other than that skills do not have requirements other than memory slots. Each point beyond the first then adds some minor bonus.
The great part of this system is that each point spent is quite unique. For example, hydrosophist increases the healing and magic armor restoration you do with your abilities, whereas necromancer heals you when you deal damage with either spells, skills or attack.
This allows you to really customize your character as you want.
The bad part is that each point is actually rather low impact. While I have no doubt that as we level further and start to stack points into a single tree, that those points can be felt, it just didn't feel very exciting to level them up. Especially the defensive ones like armor, magic armor and vitality. Yay, i just gained 1% hp.
I would see them doubled, with enemies scaling accordingly, of course.
On top of that, some are more useful than others, even for schools that are not usually associated with them. My Elf knight did so much damage that pumping necromancy to selfheal even though 90% of my playstyle evolved around Warfare, was actually better than putting points into Warfare itself. That could be justified on a hybrid, but on a pure knight that didn't use a single necromancy skill that felt a bit awkward from a design perspective.
And just to round this section off, even though this post is about combat in general, I must applaude you for the division between combat and civil abilities. I hope you keep them seperate.
Skills and spells:
All in all I am very happy about the available skills and spells in the EA. One of my biggest issues with D:OS1 was the lack of versatility and useful skills for rogues, hunters and warriors. Too much of their playstyle was about autoattacking. Even though that was partially addressed in the Enhanced Edition, D:OS2 has brought melee and bow classes up to par with mages.
First things first though: Memory slots. While most skills only require a single memory slot, some of the more powerful ones require 3. The only problem is that I have yet to find a single skill, even though I have tried most of them, where I could justify that hefty memory slot cost. On top of that, most of them require source (scarse) AND more AP to cast!
With a memory slot cost of 2, I could see myself using some of them. Right now though, they feel a bit too restrictive for my taste...
The overall balancing of the skills and spells is decent. Necromancy spells feel the weakest, but hydro, aero and pyro are all good in their own right. However...
..Hailstrike(hydro) is pretty bonkers though, doing far too much damage and cc in too big an aoe for too little AP. It's also bugged, it causes damage and cc quite a bit beyond it's range indicator.
Rage (Warfare) is so OP in it's current form that using it (especially in combination with Warlord) makes every encounter barring the EA final boss trivial. In order to justify 100% crit chance and the movespeed bonus, Rage would need to remove all armor and magic armor on you, and double damage received from all sources. Right now the drawback is non-existant.
Snipe (huntsman) is in itself pretty balanced. But with sneak, guerilla and Rage I was critting for 750 dmg at lvl 6 with a 60 dmg crossbow... Took out the voidwoken in a single hit. But those have been the only real outliers that I've found.
Talents:
I was disappointed to see so few new talents for the EA, and that many of the old ones that were underpowered, had not been buffed. When was the last time you picked Morning Person, Five Star Diner or Escapist?
At least the new talents that were included are good. Hothead, Pawn and Savage Sortilege all have their merits. Glass cannon is strong as hell again. Warlords, as mentioned a few times, is blatantly overpowered and in the same category as Rage. Even at 1 AP per kill it's still a no-brainer, unless we get other ways to manipulate the AP pool.
I really hope the talent tree is being worked on and reiterated. Talents are granted so seldom, and it would be nice to have more than 1/3 of the talents being worth choosing.
Itemization:
I would very much like to see some differences between the different types of weapons. Why should I use a sword over a club, for example? The sword could have an implicit 10% bonus chance to hit. The club could deal an extra 25% damage to armor. See what I am getting at?
Oh, and weapon switching. Can we not make that a thing, without having to spend a ton of AP and do it manually? I really want to make a huntsman/rogue hybrid, but in it's current state that is not worth it at all. A warrior could switch between 2h against enemies that have been cc'ed, and a shield when facing multiple ranged enemies he can't get to..
Speaking of shields, they are pretty shitty in their current state. Bonus armor is too low compared to the damage you're giving up compared to 2h or dualwield. Even shieldless 1h is better, since it reduces your AP per attack from 2 to 1.
Regenerating armor in combat, by that magical or physical seem very scarse. Frost armor and fortify does it, and a few consumables. To the best of my knowledge, that's about it. That severely limits the value of armor in long drawn out battles...
Combat itself:
Building on the above, if tanky characters are ever to be a thing, then they need ways to manipulate the battlefriend. Right now, offense (hard cc included here) is a much better defense than having high armor/resist/magic armor. Without taunt, there is no way besides positioning for you to redirect damage from your squishies to your tank.
Several skills should be added to address this issue. D:OS1 EE added a taunt skill, which was a good start. Other options include: Skills that allow you to support your team with massive defensive buffs based on your own level of tankyness, essentially forcing them to focus your tank before they can hope to bring down your team.
What about an aggro system based on distance to enemy, to make enemies significantly favor (but never guarantee) attacking close party members? That would favor building tanky on warriors, while rogues still have their 'get-in-get-out' shenanigans.
Wrapping it up
Combat feel more fluent than in D:OS1. AI took forever to complete it's combat, would often stall, casting multiple spells was a chore due to some innate animation cooldown period etc. It definitely feels much smoother now.
Overall, I had a highly enjoyable time playing the EA. Some changes needs to be made. Thankfully, a lot of them are just crunching numbers. Others need some revision, but very few demand an actual overhaul.
Overall I can see the potential for this game and it's combat/leveling mechanics to surpass the original.
Cheers, and see you once more content ha been added to the EA.