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Sorry, but being dependent on (random !!!) stat boosting items in order to create a char that can take a hit and hit the broad side of a barn is not good game design.

@Kiste: Oblivion would be my #2 as worst leveling system ever.
Number 1 goes to: Final Fantasy 2
You gain max HP, when you lose HP in combat, you gain max MP when you lose MP in combat, When you attack, your weapon skill and str go up and your int goes down, when you cast, your int goes up and your str goes down. Weapon skill and spells improve if you use them a million times. So one effective way to improve your stats is to start combat with the easiest enemy you find and party members attack and heal each other with whatever skill they want to improve until you run out of MP. Then rest and repeat. This works until the final dungeon. Then you face bosses who deal and absorb damage depending on your max HP. So in the end you should have very little HP but strong combat skill, otherwise the boss will heal itself faster than you could ever damage it by absorbing your health. Never finished it (died a lot at what I hope is the final boss) and never want to start it again.


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Well hopefully we will hear something from Larian about this soon.


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I'm not a fan of the way the attributes currently work either.

I quite enjoyed the way it worked in DOS:1. Was there a reason that they moved away from the previous system?


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Yeah, this new system totaly destroy hybrid classes.

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Since this topic is getting a lot of attention, please allow me to provide some perspective.

The fact that your effective damage can go down after a level-up is a bug. The idea was that your effective damage stays the same in case of weapons, since weapons are supposed to apply bonuses according to their level. For skills, the effective damage is supposed to stay the same since their damage automatically increases when you level up, negating the reduction of the bonus.

Attribute bonuses where designed with following aims in mind:
1) We wanted to avoid small cumulative bonuses like "1 point in Strength gives you 1% damage increase" since they are unnoticeable during early game, which is important for Early Access content. We want attribute points to matter immediately, and not 10 hours later.

2) On the other hand, keeping large percentage bonuses (10%+) would lead to increasing Vitality gaps between levels, since we need to keep difficulty constant. In turn, this leads to more linear and rigid progression where players cannot take on fights 1-2 levels higher and must look for fights of their level before proceeding.

3) We also wanted to keep the door open for hybrid classes. It is important to point out that addition of Physical and Magic Armour and also high ground bonuses have made hybridizing a lot more potent. For example, if you split your points in INT and STR, you will get 15% damage decrease compared to pure INT or pure STR characters. It is not a big price to pay for ability to attack the weaker of two Armours of your opponents (and many enemies have only one type of Armour). Similarly, if you put some points in STR for your ranger you can continue to enjoy high ground bonuses, while not being completely defenseless when a 3-ton crocodile teleports on your head.

Regardless of the above, the current system is going to be changed, since it ended up feeling counter-intuitive and unrewarding.

The following is the new system that we want to try out in the near future:

1) Each new point in STR, FIN or INT provides a flat amount of damage to corresponding attacks and skills. This amount grows with levels. The numbers will change, but currently an attack with a 2H or an average 2AP skill would receive 3 damage per attribute point on level 1, 4 damage on level 2, etc.
2) The bonus is applied to the total damage of the skill or attack. Hail Strike receives same bonus as Fireball, despite dealing 4 instances of damage.
3) The bonus is multiplied by the AP cost of the attack or skill. When dual-wielding you will receive double bonus compared to wielding a single 1H weapon.

Please let us know what you think of this new system and thank you for sticking with us through Early Access smile

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Overall, the new system sounds much better.

The flat damage (increasing with level) vs the percentage (down with level) will just FEEL better, even if equivalent - the second case makes your character feel weaker over time, the first makes you feel like you improve.

Hybrid classing is viable - how viable depends on the relative ratio of the extra damage vs the base damage. Diminishing returns on the extra would further help hybrids, if that is wanted. As in the past, sticking to one skill tree for damage while dabbling in others for utility will still probably end up best overall.

The scaling with AP cost sounds good, but could occasionally cause some oddities - a high damage vs low damage + utility skill will get the same bonus, despite having different roles. I suppose this is because status effects are now 100% chance, we can't increase their chance like in the original DOS.

I am curious about what is happening with wits and the secondary effects of Str/Int/Fin - in the current system, they provide % bonuses that get worse as you level. I would assume we are moving to a flat (small, eg .1) amount of initiative per wits, but what about the critical chances / dodge chances / armor penalty reduction?

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Originally Posted by Monodon
Since this topic is getting a lot of attention, please allow me to provide some perspective.

...

Please let us know what you think of this new system and thank you for sticking with us through Early Access smile


Good stuff thanks for the response, looking forward to trying this out smile

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@Monodon:
Thank you for your response.
The new system sounds much better on paper.
We will see how good it is when we play it. I mean the current system must have sounded good on paper too, otherwise you would not have taken it.

At the moment, you do get stronger when you level up (My lv6 char makes more damage than my char at lv1). But it feels not good when you level up and your damage and hit chance go down compared to a minute ago (when you still have the old equipment).


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[quote=Stabbey]
For the most part, equipment which has bonuses are ONLY available through RNG. I'm level 3 and have explored much of the fort interior areas, and I have found a bunch of chests now that I retrieved the Teleport gloves and such, but the RNG has not smiled on me and basically all the equipment I found is not good for any of my characters.[/quote]

This plays into what I was saying about it only being really bad at very low levels. Minor spoilers, but when you leave the fort and get all the waypoints, there are 5 vendors very close to wayshrines that you can teleport to which all are guaranteed to sell a full inventory of magic, levelled equipment.

Once you get to the Lv5~7 range, you can use them to completely deck out your entire party with good equipment without relying on RNG finds/drops, just by visiting them every time you finish a quest or level up. Thievery + Bartering (on separate characters) is a very strong skill combination for this.

You can't do this with the early vendors (they don't sell great stuff regardless of your level), which feeds into your equipment being so weak at first.

Once you have access to better vendors, the only time when RNG drops really matter are the Epic (purple) ones you get from certain boss fights, but those are more nice-to-have than required in the current state of the game (maybe it'll be different in the full version in Hard mode - we'll see).

[quote=Altros] You could sink combat points into vitality to still get an HP increase but then you miss out on your schools.[/quote]

Constitution gives a large amount of HP in the current build, and it's very easy to find +CON pants on vendors once you get to around Lv6. You also occasionally see +CON rings, and there's a unique one with +2 in one of the EA dungeons.

I don't agree with the bit about tanks being weak at all. I think 2H tank is actually the strongest class in the game by far right now. They benefit very much from being immune to CC while their armor is still up. Rage + Adrenaline + Warlord + Phoenix Dive + Crushing Blow/Whirlwind/Battering Ram is immensely powerful. Crushing Blow in particular is an incredibly strong skill right now.

The second-to-last fight in the EA is 5 Lv8 enemies and a Lv10. My Lv6 Warrior killed the Lv10 and 4 of the Lv8s in a single turn, and left the last one knocked down. His last Crushing Blow on the final boss did 1182 damage. He had 30 STR and 100% ACC against everything. My mages can't come anywhere remotely close to that. I think only a Ranger's Snipe could go anywhere near that, and even then it would cost 2 more AP, and only hit a single target.

They might be weak for you if you build them defensively. Currently, I think tanks are most effective playing offensively with 2H weapons. You use teleportation to cluster enemies together, have the tank run/phoenix dive in the middle and kill/knockdown everything, Battle Stomp if you need to clear a surface (or have a mage Bless you if the enemies can make cursed surfaces) and use Armor/HP to tank the attacks of whatever survives, with mages/rangers far away on CC/healing/support. If it's a prolonged fight, you can get armor back by having 3~4 characters that can cast Fortify/Armor of Frost supporting 1 or 2 tanks.

We're also effectively playing without actually doing much with any of the Source Point skills right now. I imagine those will have a big impact on class balance in the final version.

Last edited by KaelanBG; 19/09/16 04:46 PM.
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Ok hoping to see this new system in place soon.


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[quote=Monodon]
3) The bonus is multiplied by the AP cost of the attack or skill. When dual-wielding you will receive double bonus compared to wielding a single 1H weapon.
[/quote]

If you are going to do this you should offer some form of incentive for going 1H weapon + no-off-hand

The Shadowblade uses a dagger + no-off-hand by default for example.

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@ KaelanBG: So... the melee is good if you use all broken skills and talents along with him? That's... ehm... no.

Also I will comment on a new system once I play with it.

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Originally Posted by Monodon

Please let us know what you think of this new system


If the end goal of the changes is for the relative damage to stay at a similar level throughout the game, then what is the point of having stats leveling up at all?

It would be a much cleaner implementation for the player to simply distribute their stats as they see fit at the start, and then only increase them scarcely(once every few levels), similar to the original game, or taken further: similar to pointbuy in D&D or SPECIAL in Fallout.

That way a change of a single point is actually meaningful, your weaker stats do not fall behind as the game progresses, etc.

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Well any improvement over the current system will be welcome.


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Originally Posted by Monodon
Since this topic is getting a lot of attention, please allow me to provide some perspective.

The fact that your effective damage can go down after a level-up is a bug. The idea was that your effective damage stays the same in case of weapons, since weapons are supposed to apply bonuses according to their level. For skills, the effective damage is supposed to stay the same since their damage automatically increases when you level up, negating the reduction of the bonus.

Attribute bonuses where designed with following aims in mind:
1) We wanted to avoid small cumulative bonuses like "1 point in Strength gives you 1% damage increase" since they are unnoticeable during early game, which is important for Early Access content. We want attribute points to matter immediately, and not 10 hours later.

2) On the other hand, keeping large percentage bonuses (10%+) would lead to increasing Vitality gaps between levels, since we need to keep difficulty constant. In turn, this leads to more linear and rigid progression where players cannot take on fights 1-2 levels higher and must look for fights of their level before proceeding.

3) We also wanted to keep the door open for hybrid classes. It is important to point out that addition of Physical and Magic Armour and also high ground bonuses have made hybridizing a lot more potent. For example, if you split your points in INT and STR, you will get 15% damage decrease compared to pure INT or pure STR characters. It is not a big price to pay for ability to attack the weaker of two Armours of your opponents (and many enemies have only one type of Armour). Similarly, if you put some points in STR for your ranger you can continue to enjoy high ground bonuses, while not being completely defenseless when a 3-ton crocodile teleports on your head.

Regardless of the above, the current system is going to be changed, since it ended up feeling counter-intuitive and unrewarding.

The following is the new system that we want to try out in the near future:

1) Each new point in STR, FIN or INT provides a flat amount of damage to corresponding attacks and skills. This amount grows with levels. The numbers will change, but currently an attack with a 2H or an average 2AP skill would receive 3 damage per attribute point on level 1, 4 damage on level 2, etc.
2) The bonus is applied to the total damage of the skill or attack. Hail Strike receives same bonus as Fireball, despite dealing 4 instances of damage.
3) The bonus is multiplied by the AP cost of the attack or skill. When dual-wielding you will receive double bonus compared to wielding a single 1H weapon.

Please let us know what you think of this new system and thank you for sticking with us through Early Access smile


For the record, I definitely had this feeling that despite my damage and power increasing as you have described by level, actually leveling up and looking at my character sheet 'felt' bad. And because the current system wasn't obvious (nobody tells you your damage increases on level up) you kind of get the feeling that it does but it doesn't erase the negative feeling of seeing a -stats on your character sheet.

So while I eventually had hints that I understood what was happening, I didn't like it.
I hope that your next attempt achieves the same or a similar result with its scaling,
but I can already tell that it will 'feel' better.

If you do feel it worthwhile to make a return to the old math, take some time to dress it up. A rough example (Each point in a stat generates +(#)% of bonus damage per level, so 100% is parity where you put 2 points in per level) But it's always a positive number, even if it's 0.92... or 92%.
Or you can simply state your level adjusted damage bonus value/modifier value. It would increase with each level and stat point, so it would always look positive and be improving on your skill sheet (if you were investing) but the actual numbers would be the same as they are now.

In other words: I think the problem with the previous system was presentation, not function.
The new system looks good - so I hope it functions the similarly.

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Originally Posted by Surrealialis
For the record, I definitely had this feeling that despite my damage and power increasing as you have described by level, actually leveling up and looking at my character sheet 'felt' bad. And because the current system wasn't obvious (nobody tells you your damage increases on level up) you kind of get the feeling that it does but it doesn't erase the negative feeling of seeing a -stats on your character sheet.

So while I eventually had hints that I understood what was happening, I didn't like it.
I hope that your next attempt achieves the same or a similar result with its scaling,
but I can already tell that it will 'feel' better.

If you do feel it worthwhile to make a return to the old math, take some time to dress it up. A rough example (Each point in a stat generates +(#)% of bonus damage per level, so 100% is parity where you put 2 points in per level) But it's always a positive number, even if it's 0.92... or 92%.
Or you can simply state your level adjusted damage bonus value/modifier value. It would increase with each level and stat point, so it would always look positive and be improving on your skill sheet (if you were investing) but the actual numbers would be the same as they are now.

In other words: I think the problem with the previous system was presentation, not function.
The new system looks good - so I hope it functions the similarly.


I rather think that if putting 100% of your 2 points per level into your primary attack attribute is "what is expected" to maintain parity, then it still seems to be a problem even if it's presented slightly better.

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Here's something to note; the soft caps are ridiculously low.

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Originally Posted by KaelanBG


Originally Posted by Altros
You could sink combat points into vitality to still get an HP increase but then you miss out on your schools.


Constitution gives a large amount of HP in the current build, and it's very easy to find +CON pants on vendors once you get to around Lv6. You also occasionally see +CON rings, and there's a unique one with +2 in one of the EA dungeons.

I don't agree with the bit about tanks being weak at all. I think 2H tank is actually the strongest class in the game by far right now. They benefit very much from being immune to CC while their armor is still up. Rage + Adrenaline + Warlord + Phoenix Dive + Crushing Blow/Whirlwind/Battering Ram is immensely powerful. Crushing Blow in particular is an incredibly strong skill right now.

The second-to-last fight in the EA is 5 Lv8 enemies and a Lv10. My Lv6 Warrior killed the Lv10 and 4 of the Lv8s in a single turn, and left the last one knocked down. His last Crushing Blow on the final boss did 1182 damage. He had 30 STR and 100% ACC against everything. My mages can't come anywhere remotely close to that. I think only a Ranger's Snipe could go anywhere near that, and even then it would cost 2 more AP, and only hit a single target.

They might be weak for you if you build them defensively. Currently, I think tanks are most effective playing offensively with 2H weapons. You use teleportation to cluster enemies together, have the tank run/phoenix dive in the middle and kill/knockdown everything, Battle Stomp if you need to clear a surface (or have a mage Bless you if the enemies can make cursed surfaces) and use Armor/HP to tank the attacks of whatever survives, with mages/rangers far away on CC/healing/support. If it's a prolonged fight, you can get armor back by having 3~4 characters that can cast Fortify/Armor of Frost supporting 1 or 2 tanks.

We're also effectively playing without actually doing much with any of the Source Point skills right now. I imagine those will have a big impact on class balance in the final version.


For class balance, something needs to be done about archers. There's actually no reason, from a min-max standpoint, to play anything other than an archer in this build.

Attributes: Finesse (literally nothing else)
Combat Abilities: Huntsman, 1 point into Warfare
Civil Abilities: Sneak
Talents (outside of the usual All Skilled Up and Bigger and Better): Arrow Recovery, Guerilla
Skills: Blood Oath (elf racial), Snipe, First Aid, Tactical Retreat, Rage

You can solo the entire game with that build. It even leaves you a free skill slot with the default amount of memory points. The only times you should take damage is from enemies that have been hard-coded by the game to see through sneak. (Which, by the way, is a horrible way to try and balance sneak. It makes zero sense for me to run through a door into the corner of a room and sneak just to watch some random knight beeline straight for the room and hit me with a grenade with pinpoint accuracy.)

With everything stacked, Snipe will 1-shot literally everything except the last boss unless you're grossly underleveled for the fight. Fully buffed from sneak with height advantage: +25% damage from blood oath, +50% damage from Guerilla, +X% damage from Huntsman, +100% damage from Snipe's effect, guaranteed critical from Rage. Easily over 1000 damage. Afterwards, you simply wait in sneak for cooldowns to be off. Rinse repeat.

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@Atros burn my eyes also gives a good stat buff and you can get it from eating body parts (I forget which one) if you want even more damage.

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Originally Posted by Altros
Afterwards, you simply wait in sneak for cooldowns to be off. Rinse repeat.


This is a known issue, and will be patched soon. In EE, enemies would actually wander around and look for you. No idea why they don't anymore, but Swen already said that they plan on adding it back.

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