I am wondering if 4 characters is a bit too little to accommodate all the skill trees. most of the time my party is: 1 mage air/hydro 1 mage fire/earth/necro 1 Ranger/scoundrel 1 warrior
I am wondering where on earth I would put the summoning master skill tree and the polymorph skill tree.
I think that with 4 characters to control we will have to choose what skill tree we ignore (or a lonely point in the tree).
I would suggest that if it is possible to bump the party size to 6. This would mean a huge overhaul of the combat difficulty and the inventory management would become even more strenuous. But at least you would be able to use all the skill to their full potential?
Last edited by Morbo; 02/03/1712:06 PM.
Not in the mood for cheese? That excuse has more holes than a slice this fine Gorgombert!
You mean that you might actually have to pick and choose which ROLES you want your party to PLAY and not be able to cover all the classes fully? *gasp* How terrible! (/sarcasm)
It's totally fine if you can't use all the skill trees at once. It's not a bad thing at all to have to pick and choose which areas to focus on. That's a large part of building a balanced team.
Zero chance Larian will bump the party size to 6.
(Also a Ranger/Scoundrel seems like a poor fit because Scoundrel skills require a dagger and Ranger skills require a bow, and switching between the two is usually a poor use of AP.)
I understand the party can't fill all the holes in skillset/roles there are. Some setups of my parties are without a scoundrel or without a ranger. There is always a certain specialty I am missing. That I am totally fine with. My worry is that there my be to many skill trees to have a balanced party. There is a difference between your party covering 75% of the skills or 40-50% of the skills. Somewhere along the road those uncovered skills will hurt you. (Great, a fire dimension/level without a water mage).
So I'm actually asking: Can I build a balanced team with 4 characters now that there will be a lot more skills or will it leave the party extremely vulnerable to a certain tactic or attack?
Yeah I know the ranger an scoundrel is a bad combo. That is just the reason why I want more than 4 (Maybe stretch goal for DOS:3).
Not in the mood for cheese? That excuse has more holes than a slice this fine Gorgombert!
For what it's worth, a 5 or 6 character party size will probably be as easy to mod in as it was in D:OS EE, though this may be more problematic and buggy than the first game with the various character interactions that will presumably be in the final game. And of course it will totally break balance, but enemy and party strength can be tweaked somewhat to compensate at least partially.
I wouldn't be too concerned that a well-balanced party will run into some extremely difficult set of fire enemies, that if only you had a water mage would be beatable. Sure, the water mage would be very useful, but not required. Most of the skill trees should be versatile enough that you'll be able to memorize different skillsets for certain fights to accomdate for different tactical approaches.
Yeah, hence "it will totally break balance." But I don't think it's out of the range of possibility that you could globally buff enemies a good amount and slightly nerf player characters and it could still be somewhat challenging, while hopefully avoiding the whole "enemies have a billion hit points just to make it challenging" feeling (which good AI should alleviate somewhat.)
The game's designed around a 4-member party. I think that allowing players to have all the skills in one party would be a mistake. You currently have to make big decisions about how your party is composed. With more party members, big decisions would be replaced with minor tweaks.
