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Post by Variaz on Mar 15, 2008 11:16:42 GMT -5
One thing you have to keep in mind is that while Enchanters does have a big advantage early in the game, as you find more blue items and artifacts that can gain levels, their advantages becomes less powerful. (and with the new Item Leveling scroll, it makes it easier to get blue items).
Let's say you place all your skill points into crafting at level 100. That's 500 points. It allows you to fill let's say 10 slots with +100 to skills, resulting in 1000 skill points wherever you want. So it could be like 500 Swords, 300 Magic Defense, 100 Defense and 100 Agility.
Now place those 500 points in the actual skills, so you get 200 Swords, 100 Magic Defense, 100 Defense and 100 Agility. But fill those 10 slots with level 100 blue items. Now spread the points in an identical way than above. In the end, you get 700 Swords, 400 Magic Defense, 200 Defense and 200 Agility, and that's not counting the additional bonus the item/artifact may already have(which can actually be pretty high later in the game, not to mention you'll get resistances). And since you actually increased the skills, you also get their feats, like the Sword skill's increased hit rate and Agility's evasion. So while the early game may be more difficult, in the long term, regular items will catch up and eventually surpass crafted items.
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Post by sekira on Mar 15, 2008 11:32:33 GMT -5
I read Kipar's post earlier, and after playing my dwarf crafter/enchanter at first I was also thinking that crafting is too powerful, but then I thought about it and came to the same conclusion Variaz came to.
Lots of power early, less power late. The best bonus that crafting gives you is letting you recraft things and get a whole new character... but I think that is a good balance against realizing late in the game what you could get the same number of tweak points from blue items that you got by investing in crafting... only now you don't have those skill points to put into other skills... but you do have the ability to be more flexible with your eq, so it balances out.
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kipar
Champion
Posts: 201
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Post by kipar on Mar 15, 2008 14:23:09 GMT -5
Yes, I agree that Variaz right - enchanter will lack blue items bonuses. But until the next game (after Quazar) - enchanter is better. Until level 20 there are very few blue items. So there in current version enchanter is better than other classes
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Post by Gando on Mar 16, 2008 14:46:29 GMT -5
Well but the story so far is only 1/4th the total at least....in terms of levels anyway. It might not be wise to try and judge the game balance based on that.
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Post by sekira on Mar 17, 2008 0:11:30 GMT -5
One way that I would balance Crafting some more would be to not allow any items to ever have crafting bonuses. Not purple, blue, yellow, or green. I know you can't tweak crafting into a crafted item already, but if you can tweak it into leveled items, then it might be exploitable by a crafter... get 500 crafting, plus 1000 crafting from blue items... that would be broken.
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kipar
Champion
Posts: 201
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Post by kipar on Mar 19, 2008 14:27:56 GMT -5
About crafting vs. blue items balance again: there is one more factor: +75% bonus (+50% racial and +25% class) to crafting can allow it to overcome normal characters: 100 level blue items + 500 skills points = 1500 tweak points 500*1.75=875 level crafting = 1750 tweak points. Yes, i'm not counting bonuses to skills, but they are not added to blue items bonus and not very high (max 50% and only to one or two skills) (so you can get something like 1600 tweakpoints and crafting still is better). Maybe replace racial crafting bonus to 25% or even remove it and replace with something else?
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Post by phlinn on Mar 19, 2008 14:44:46 GMT -5
I think drop it to 25%. When it was first put in, crafting wasn't nearly as useful. 50% is an exceptional skill bonus.
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Post by Variaz on Mar 19, 2008 14:49:00 GMT -5
What you say is only true for Dwarves and Humans, and don't forget that some of the later artifacts and greens will have very high base bonus BEFORE you actually being to tweak them. (I,ve seen some high rank greens in debug mode having like +100 to a skill). And don't forget resistances!
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Post by junyortrakr on Mar 19, 2008 20:31:16 GMT -5
Yes, interesting thoughts. I'm going to add a few thoughts on possible suggestions for a few things, and I'm sure you'll all have plenty of reasons something else is better, but I think they may at least spur some discussion.
CRAFTING: Your skill at crafting various weapons, armors and objects from various components. A skilled smith will be able to create many types of weapons and armors, and even some unique weapons only available to the most talented.
Effects: - Allow you to create weapons, armors and other items. - Improve quality of crafted weapons and armors.
Crafting, like Alchemy, gives you the use of the "Combine Items" command, which allow you to combine two items into one item. It works exactly the same way, except it's your Crafting skill that will be used.
As mentionned above, some items require the use of both skills. For instance, an item that would require a material component and an alchemical one, if it has a depth level of 30, you would need a Crafting skill of 15 and al Alchemy of 15 to create it.
And about crafting combinations...it's up to you to find them!
NOTE: If you use a magical item for crafting, the resulted item (if any) will NOT be magical, so be warned!
SPECIAL FEATS:
- Decompose Item(Active, 2 points): Items are made from various components. By using various processes and techniques, you can disassemble one item to get the components it was originally made from. Not all items can be decomposed.
Effects: Destroy an item, and place it's two components in your inventory. Some items cannot be crafted, and will not give you any components. Note that in order to decompose non-alchemic items, your Crafting skill must be high enough. For example, to decompose an iron long sword, your skill needs to be 30.
- High Quality Crafting(Passive, 20 points): A skilled craftsman can craft items of higher than normal quality that are useable by enchanters.
Effects: These items will be orange-coded and useable for enchanting. Also, for every 5 points in Crafting, your item will gain one extra level of basic stats and bonuses. This will not allow you to create or decompose more difficult items, but it will allow you to make them more effective. For example, with Crafting 20, you could make a steel flail as if your crafting skill was 24. Note : these items are magical and cannot be enchanted with magic item or leveling scrolls.
- Rare Item Crafting(Passive, 50 points): A very skilled craftsman can create items that allow enchanters to embue them with extra effectiveness.
Effect: These items will have a greater base depth for the item type, allowing them to receive greater enchantements. For every 4 points of Crafting skill, the item depth will increase 1%. For example, with a skill of 100, a mithril shield, which could normally receive 40 points of enchantment, could now receive 50.
Enchanter Ability:
10. Crafted Item Enchanting(Passive, level 10)
Effect: This ability allows you to add custom enchantments to an orange-coded crafted item.
Maximum original item's depth for enchanting: 4 Item ability points: 4 Extra points: +4 to maximum item's depth. +4 to ability points
This ability allows your crafted items to gain custom magical abilities like other magical items have. Although at times you may get more total ability points with leveling and especially artifact items, these points all come immediately, and, with a high crafting skill, the base stats and bonuses will be very good as well. Please be careful to note item enchanting limits(See Crafting: Rare Item Crafting).
~~~~~ I thought this would be a reasonable variation on the current crafting and enchanting layout. I thought it reasonable to leave all enchantments within enchantment class, but that it might be good to slightly enhance the base abilities of crafted items with respect to random ones. In a related thought, I'm adding some proposed enchantment limits based on item depth. I think something similar to it could be useful whether the other changes I propose are adopted or not. ~~~~~
Item Enchantment Limits
It has been mentioned that it may be desirable to limit how many enchantments can be placed on items depending upon their base quality. I propose the following maximum ability roll limits:
Purple items: base item depth(BID) ability rolls(AR) Blue items: BID AR plus 1 AR/lvl, (BID + 5) lvls, 100 lvls max Artifacts: (1.5 * BID) AR plus 1 AR/lvl, (BID + 10) lvls, 100 lvls max Crafted: Adjusted BID AR(See Crafting: Rare Item Crafting).
~~~~~ I think something like this would allow for a reasonable power progression with items. It would also encourage players to upgrade their items throughout the game as older ones became obsolete. Please feel free to add comments as I have no doubt these thoughts are far from perfect.
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Post by Variaz on Mar 19, 2008 22:44:43 GMT -5
The thing is that if we do that, then Crafting becomes good for ONLY the Enchanter, and nothing else. And for those who enjoys creating items, it will take a long time to actually get the ability to create great custom items, at which point they'll just give up crafted items in favor of blues/artifacts. And being forced to invest lots of points in the level 10 ability limits to get the items puts the player at a great disadvantage compared to crafted items.
I have no plans to put enchantments limits on random magic items either. Especially not purples, which are already not too strong in comparison to other type of magic items.
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Post by junyortrakr on Mar 20, 2008 20:42:35 GMT -5
Anyway, they were just thoughts for discussion.
I had a couple quick questions about alchemy and enchanting, though, as I'm not quite sure how a couple things work.
Alchemic Branding: Only one brand per item, correct?
Alchemic Resistances:
---Is it possible to remove a resistance from an item? I know a number of random items have assorted small resists on them, and it would be nice if you could remove them to place a single, larger resist.
---I am assuming that the 25% of alchemy limit on resistances means 25% of your alchemy skill in total % resists on the item. Is this correct?
---If you only place a single resist on an item, is it still limited to 25% of your alchemy skill, or is it only limited by the potion or 100%?
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Post by Variaz on Mar 22, 2008 13:02:08 GMT -5
Yes.
No, you can't remove resistances from an item.
Yes.
It's still limited to 25% of your alchemy skill. And adding the resistance will never cause the total resistances to exceed 25% of your Alchemy skill.
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Post by sekira on Mar 24, 2008 10:54:18 GMT -5
Ok, so I've been thinking about it a little more, and I've been playing crafters (2 different characters so far) and I think I've come to the conclusion that crafting is too powerful after all.
It is certainly too powerful in the early game. I think it will continue to be too powerful in the mid game, since the best eq that non-crafters can get is a few blue items here and there... greens will not be available until the late game.
The argument that crafting is not as powerful in the late game may be true on a strict item by item comparison vs leveled up blues, and especially leveled up greens, but the strength in crafting is not in the pure stats vs stats power, it is in the flexibility.
You can have a set of chr eq in your home for buying and selling stuff, and you can have a set of casting eq in your inventory, and wear a set of melee eq.
Lets look at a dwarven crafter enchanter for an example... and since there is no question that early and mid game, crafting is overpowered, lets just look at the one place in the game where crafting is being argued as not overpowered... the late game.
So at level 100, a dwarven crafter in my opinion would have the following skills to be optimal:
crafting: base 390, with bonuses 682 alchemy: base 80, with bonuses 100 agility: base 30, with penalties 23
lets assume that since this character has put so much investment in crafting they are going to also put a lot of APs in improved enchanting... say about 60 pts
This means that crafted items can be of depth up to 227, meaning any item in the game, EVERY SINGLE ITEM gets a bonus of 341 to hit 341 to damage, 341 to ac. With about 20 AP in defense transfer, I think you can transfer about 400 base ac to everything, as well as making your own torso armor have what... close to 2000 base ac. Each item will have about 200 tweak points. And you can also put up to 25% in total resistance on each item.
2000 total tweak points, 250% total resistance (wait, some base items have resists too don't they? hmm), close to 6000 base ac, + 3410 to hit + 3410 to damage + 3410 to ac.
I really think that blows away the 500 base skill points + whatever tweak points non-crafters have to work really hard to get on leveling items...
That doesn't even get to the point of having 30 agility with your crafter... carry two or three seperate sets of eq around with you and swap it out in 0 time. You could have 1800 tweak points (torso can't be swapped 0 time) of a caster, and also 1800 tweak points of a melee fighter, with a weapon with 682% of the base damage roll to boot. You find a new base weapon you like, well, just recraft everything to focus on using that base weapon instead of the previous one. Your 1800 tweak point caster can have ungodly stat boost spells to make you even more uber scary powerful for short bursts.
The non-crafter has to slowly build up tweak points in their items, so there is really no flexibility at all, once they commit on a path with their blue items, they are bound to it, or they have to start the whole process over again.
Also, if they find a really nice green item, they might be forced to discard that treasured blue item that they finally got up to a decent level. Crafters can just recraft in a few minutes (although why would they? not because they found a green item, their crafted items provide much more flexibility, maybe if they find a new base item that they want to craft...), providing they have access to the base materials for the rest of their set, which is all they will be stockpiling so I don't think they will have any problems there.
I know I haven't actually played the late game, so I don't know for sure all the benefits of the green and blue items, but in my mind having random skill and stat bonuses before any leveling is done doesn't make up for the awesome number of tweak points that crafting allows, and those points can be put EXACTLY where you want them... most random bonuses won't be useful, I mean, who cares if your neat new green item is a mithril plate with +50 to Leadership if you are a martial artist? Martial artists can't use toro armor and I don't think most martial artists are summoners anyway... See my point?
The only penalty in my example here is the APs, but wait, if the character is willing to forgo the ability to put 25% resists on items, they rely on casting 100% magic resist I think... so now they have 787 crafting, and that is 157 tweak points each item, drop the 20 AP's in defense transfer and 60 AP's in improved enchanting... still 1570 tweak points, still get to swap out 1413 of those 0 time... You lose about half your base ac, but you gain 80 more APs to spend... ACK! thats just nuts.
And don't even get me started on stockpiling purples, blues and greens with crafting bonuses to further boost your crafted items... which is why I suggested making it impossible to ever get crafting bonuses on any item a little while ago.
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Post by sekira on Mar 24, 2008 11:12:12 GMT -5
Oh, I almost forgot my suggestion to help balance crafting... make the tweak points you get from crafting based on your base skill before any racial or class bonuses, and before any equipment bonuses. That would still let dwarves make superior items as far as their to hit, to dam, base ac and base damage roll goes, which I think would be nice, but it would narrow the gap between dwarves and the rest of the races as far as tweak points go, and it would balance out the "uber crafter" character I just described.
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Post by Variaz on Mar 24, 2008 12:02:54 GMT -5
Oh, I almost forgot my suggestion to help balance crafting... make the tweak points you get from crafting based on your base skill before any racial or class bonuses, and before any equipment bonuses. That would still let dwarves make superior items as far as their to hit, to dam, base ac and base damage roll goes, which I think would be nice, but it would narrow the gap between dwarves and the rest of the races as far as tweak points go, and it would balance out the "uber crafter" character I just described. Now, I don't want to start going that way too much. If we remove too many features of the skill bonus, then what's the point of having skill bonuses? The feats are one thing, but the skill bonus should still be effective. Maybe 1 per 5 points was too much, and perhaps 1 craft point per 10 points would be better. Would make sense too since you get the enchanting ability at skill level 10, not 5. And at crafting level 100, for example, you still get 10 points, which is nice. Combined with the item's improved base bonus and the versatility of the skill, it would still be very effective. I want dwarves and humans to keep their bonus, as they are supposed to be the best in Portralis. But dwarves might be lowered to 25%, like humans. They already have great bonus for melee, so they don't need 50% in Crafting. As Phlinn said before, the 50% was back when Crafting was next to useless.
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