Larian Banner: Baldur's Gate Patch 9
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Joined: May 2017
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Simple question: should we bring back physical resistance.

One of the mage's worst fear is to encounter enemies resistant to their main source of damage. This is one of the reasons why everyone is complaining about mage's being weak.

However, simply increasing magic damage, or reducing physical damage, may just shift the game play from full physical team to full magical team.

The easy fix is to make some enemies better at tanking physical damage, while some are better at tanking magical damage. Thus players are encouraged to make a balanced party with both physical/magical damage.

Of course, the physical resistance cannot go too high that makes physical team completely useless. Maybe somewhere between 20%-50%.

Thoughts on this suggestion?

Last edited by waterzxc; 29/05/17 01:46 PM.
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but with the 2 different armor types theres already enemys who are better vs mages with a high magic armor but low normal armor
and the ones who have a high amount of normal armor and low magic armor

making it so ur physical chars focus the ones with the low armor
and ur casters the ones with the low magic armor

so i think it already nice to have a mixed team of magic/physic damage

and since u also get cc´s that go through phys armor check and some through magic armor
u dont need to burn down both armor types to get a cc off

on the enemys that have a high resistance to the element that ur mage uses i would suggest at least using 2 elements (fire/ground for eartch fire and poison dmg for example) its quite unlikely that one enemy has a high resistence to all those elements + u can also take a 4th one in ur weapon
u could also invest 1 point into other skills and swap out ur spells when u encounter certain enemys that have high resistance to ur usual setup
u wont deal that much dmg since u did not max like aerothurge but u still can deal nice dmg with the air spells regardless and its better than going into poison/fire resistant enemys with ur normal poison fire setup


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Would rather see just one armor type for the "barrier" and give heavy armor more physical resist and light more magic, with med in between if they plan to keep an armor system. Enemies defenses will have to be set and make sense, but I would like to see a lot of enemy changes, like charging crocs instead of teleporting crocs.

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but the croc does tp and not charge cause it ate the teleporting gauntlet

cause of that it makes sense that it can use teleport
so they dont really need to change that

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The point the OP is making is that given similar circumstances like equivalent amount of phy/magical armor, magic will by default be at a disadvantage DPS wise thanks to elemental resistances. Given this, why bother bringing magic characters then since the disparity between physical and magical armor characters merely offset magic's in built weakness in the best of cases but highlights magic's weakness in the majority of cases.

Just consider these scenarios,

If you meet a hypothetical mob like maybe a Fire Mage with 100 magic armor/ 50 physical armor and maybe 50% fire resist with 100 hp.

A physical dps who does 25 damage per 2 ap would finish the fight in 12 ap.
A magical dps who does 25 fire damage per 2 ap would finish the fight in 16 ap without factoring the resist. I am not sure how it affects armor/hp but lets assume its a flat reduction for illustration purposes, that means you need 24 ap.

If its a Fire Warrior with 50 magic/ 100 physical armor and 100 hp with 50% fire resist.

The same physical dps would only need 16 ap compared to the previous case of 24ap.
The same magical dps would need 12+6 ap which already makes it worse than the physical dps in the same scenario.


While the above case is biased because the magical dps is using fire to deal with a fire resistant mob, let's be honest here. Most of the other trees do not deal that much damage either by default or require Fire as an intermediary. Therefore, using Fire to deal with a fire resistant mob would more than likely be the common case. In contrast physical dps would simply plow through everything without any issue while still having the same utility as magic dps in terms of cc.

While there could be cases of mobs weak to fire, the lack of an equivalent alternative when faced with a fire resistant mobs means that these 2 cases do not cancel each other out and instead makes magic inherently weaker. Plus there are cases where mobs are just flat out immune to fire which is a scenario physical dps do not face at all.

Mobs require physical resistances as stated by the OP but to a lesser extent in order to balance this out otherwise there is really no reason to bring a mage especially when warfare is able to aoe pretty well while ccing.


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This concerns me.
I was planning to be a magic damage dealer. But seeing that the enemy could have an elemental resist AND having armor vs magic, I feel mage will become useless in late.
That may not be the case in the first act where enemy don't have much resist. But later on I fear that they will ALL have some magic resistance which will make your mage deal WAY less dmg than any physical.

At this point i think the only viable party is to make full physical damage. You won't have to bother about magic armor or elemental resist. And you will destroy armor fast enough to use cc on the enemy.

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Isn't dodging the same as physical resistance more or less? Only difference is you have a x% chance to completely avoid a hit rather than taking x% less damage when you do.

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Originally Posted by lx07
Isn't dodging the same as physical resistance more or less? Only difference is you have a x% chance to completely avoid a hit rather than taking x% less damage when you do.


Not entirely.
Dodging affects certain sources of elemental damage too, such as Wand and Staff attacks. Elemental attacks affected by dodge are double-penalized as they are reduced by elemental resistances too.

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I guess that at this point of the game development it is probably too late to change core mechanics like armor, but i feel that making it block 100% of the magic / physical damage AND makes you immune to CC makes it a bit hard to balance the game properly.

Sure, some enemies have some armor type that they are very vulnerable to, like physical damage to a lot of mages, or that heavy armor types usually have lower magic armor, something that balanced groups can take advantage of.

But it also means that situations happens where a character, usually the mage, will find himself in a position where he cannot contribute to anything in the fight. For example, if a rogue almost killed an enemy, with 5% hp and 100% magic armor remaining, but said mage's damage is all magical, so he cannot land the killing blow.

Sure, there are a couple of spells that allow you to deal physical damage, and some melee skills that deal magical damage, but whenever you use a wrong damage type, you feel like you wasted action points.

I would rather have the armor block something like 50% of the incoming damage, the other part of the damage being dealt directly to the health. Then, in opposition to pierce damage, you could introduce some skills that deal extra damage to armor or something.

Finally, I would bring back bodybuilding/will, and give a sizable bonus to your saves while your armor is still up.

Anyways, just I feel like the concept has so much untapped potential, and that the current iteration simply promotes all physical or all magical groups.



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