Un peu de technique now , ou le comment du pourquoi ils ne veulent pas des coups a 1000 pv, PvP oblige
Citan
AC2 Live Team
Total Posts: 89
Last Post: 4/2/2003
Member Since: 1/15/2003
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On 4/2/2003 2:20:07 AM sirbruce wrote:
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On 4/1/2003 4:27:59 PM Citan wrote:
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This can't be done across the board, because many powers are at the "max safe potential" for their effect. We are not willing to have a skill that does more than 400 bonus damage through armor, slow down combat speed more than 50%, or increase weapon damage more than Infected Caress already does. These skills will probably never be higher than level 50. We considered this route, but had to reject it.
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But that route is preferable to waiting until freaking SEPTEMBER, I mean, sheesh.
The thing you need to realize is all of those things may be overpowered against CURRENT mobs, but the level 50+ crowd won't be fighting many current mobs.
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I realize I didn't give a very detailed explanation yesterday, let me try again. (Edit for those just joining in: this is an explanation on why we don't want to raise skill caps from 50 to 60.)
First, it's overpowered in PvP. I know that isn't something you personally care about, as you said as much a couple pages back. But we have a decent number of people who would rather not have PvP battles shortened in duration by more than half, which is what increasing the skill maxes would do. The offensive skills far outnumber the defensive skills; increasing damage output by 20% means fights are over much faster. (And not just 20% faster, MUCH faster.) And actually, we think PvP fights are a bit too short already.
Second, because Infected Caress is percentage-based, improving weapon damage by an additional 10% would definitely be overpowered even for 50+ monsters. The problem with uber-buffs like Infected Caress is that all content has to be balanced assuming that it's likely you'll have the uber-buff. To be concrete, it means we can't add a weapon that does 500 damage, because you can then use Infected Caress on it to make it a 750 damage weapon. So instead we add a 400 damage weapon, knowing you will use Infected Caress to make it a 600 damage weapon. The problem being that now you HAVE to have Infected Caress on, or your weapon won't be adequate for the battles we intend you to use it in. Which makes Enchanters happy but others not so happy.
We are trying to come up with ways to lower the "mandatory" nature of Infected Caress and a few other buffs; we definitely do not want to make those skills MORE powerful -- that goes directly against our eventual goals.
Third, and this is related to the earlier points: we already have a tough time making monsters both fun and challenging at level 50. One reason is that monsters have to have tremendous offensive power at level 50 in order to be challenging, which means fights tend to be deadly and short. We would like battles to be a little less insta-kill, but we can't do that unless we buff defenses more than we buff offenses. That goal is not achieved by improving skills 20% across the board. The other problem is that the more we "tune" fights by taking into account the buffs that will be on them, the more mandatory those buffs become. When we balance a monster by making it do 200% damage to compensate for the 50% attack-speed debuff that could be on it, we effectively make the attack-speed debuff mandatory. The same holds true for armor debuffs, percentage-based drains, and so on. A little bit of this sort of thing is natural, but we are working to keep it in check. We want there to be lots of ways of defeating monsters; we want diverse groups to be able to succeed at killing them. Forcing groups to be made up of precisely a Sage, Enchanter, Sorceror, Zealot, and Juggernaut (or any other "mandatory" group) means other people are left out; it then becomes much harder to find a group than it currently is. The more powerful particular skills are, the more difficult it is to avoid making that skill "mandatory." In general we have already reached what we feel to be the limits for skills so that they are great to have, but not mandatory. In some places we were already wrong; a 50% combat-speed debuff is already so powerful as to almost be mandatory. We certainly can't go any further down that road.
I guess what it boils down to is that changing things in a complex system like ours will have lots of consequences. We realize that our eventual 50+ powers will have some unintended and probably unpleasant consequences, but we are doing our best to study the possibilities and be prepared to fix the problems that will arise. We aren't willing to just increase everybody's offensive power by 20% and to hell with the consequences
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