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Post by Kaybrie on May 28, 2017 2:04:47 GMT -5
I'm looking to open up a discussion about post-40 progression, which for a few people I've known to play engines has been a fairly consistent lockup point.
The chief reason that I noticed is that party composition requirements are too tight. As it stands there is a fairly strict meta when it comes to groups of 3-5 players, I don't know it for certain, but Electrohydra in discord kept wheeling back around to it so I'll trust that he knows what he's talking about. If this is the case then it would be toxic, it means that you have to formulate groups around having specific niches filled. There ought to be a balance between the casual nature of having fun going out delving dungeons and plundering loot and the tactical nature of it. The practical reason being; not every role that a party needs filled is going to always be available. Exhibit A; Tanks.
A suggestion I would put forward in this regard would be picking dungeons in each level range to have more tight or loose requirements. Making the spawns easier within that level bracket but conversely the loot less gainful. It would allow progression for 'bad' parties and not min-maxed PC's while still giving the players who are very tactically minded the option of delving harder dungeons.
My anecdotal experience I bring forward for this is that I consistently am able to solo these same dungeon's with a mercenary, though when I join a group of 3-5 people those same dungeons become almost impossibly difficult. And I don't feel like a DPS, bruiser, and tank for example should have that much difficulty clearing an on-level dungeon, though aside from one run with someone who was twice the upper level of the spider caves, I have yet to clear a single dungeon since I started logging in again with other PC's. Usually in groups of 3-5 players whom know what they're doing.
Dungeons that were a part of my experiences include; Wyler's, Swamp Cave, Mossy Cave, Waterfall Cave, and that Mine in the Wards.
TLDR; Specific Party Makeup should reward players with greater success. Players who don't have that meta available to them due to time constraints, in game politics, or otherwise should not be withheld progression.
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Post by Ostheim on May 28, 2017 10:03:00 GMT -5
I'm still a tiny baby in terms of progress, but this reads as something that should be balanced. A meta-party requirement is a pretty consistent issue across a lot of PWs, at least in NWN1 as well where I'm from, and it's difficult to manage that when real life exists. I guess a band-aid sort of fix would be to make an NPC tank really effective somehow so that a tank-like character is always on hand, but forcing parties to be reliant on an NPC strikes me as somewhat unfortunate.
Even at low levels, as long as you have 3-4 people, a tank is basically a hard requirement for mob management. Ideally, assuming it's a dungeon that isn't an intentionally difficult one that explicitly demands mechanical competence and superior party-makeup, this should be somewhat discouraged for more casual dungeon crawling.
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Post by Kitsunenotsume on May 28, 2017 10:56:10 GMT -5
I don't speak for the staff, but based off my observation of the server's development process I feel like this might benefit from clarification. From my perspective, by-and-large issue with the content at and beyond that level is that while critique can be plentiful on Discord, the feedback required to make the appropriate modifications is sparse. How does the content need be be tweaked? What situations become troublesome? What is the party composition? What is spawning? What would you expect a reasonable challenge' to spawn? what mechanics are solid? What mechanics are giving you trouble and *why*? etc. Not to beat on the dead horse too much, but all new content is added slightly overtuned with the anticipation that PCs will identify the key issues impossible to replicate in solo balancing and provide feedback. This feedback as to what seems to be the issue is vital to refining the content. If the content were too easy, no-one would comment (we've seen this before) and the fact that it gives effectively free loot and XP would go missed for months until some side-comment in Discord does not match the intention for the area. Conversely, if content is too hard, PCs can (and will) complain mercilessly, thereby allowing our developer to chip away at it until it is a smooth scale. But those feedback posts are what are critical to identify and resolve what actually needs to happen to balance the dungeons. Discord is hard enough to follow while being in the conversation, let-alone side chatter on politics, arguments, Overwatch, and only checking in intermittently. Otherwise you are asking the developer to run off solo testing with a henchman and gut intuition (both of which he already uses) to tweak entire swaths of dungeons for groups he can't plan for. Not to be snide, but feedback that amounts to "Content too hard, nerf plx" fails to provide any information on how.  We have a single dev, and many of us. Reporting issues, bugs, or critique and content lets him focus on fixing and developing, rather than finding. Thank you. |
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Post by Psionic-Entity on May 28, 2017 11:48:15 GMT -5
To add to what Kit said, there are some pretty specific things you can offer here that will help balance dungeons that seem to offer different difficulty levels to solo players and parties.
Most dungeons are set up to spawn one NPC per party member and have no further adjustments for varying party sizes. I generally think that this system favors players when party sizes get large because players can use supporting abilities, better focus fire, terrain, etc. If this isn't true then it's likely relayed to 1v1 tactics that don't scale (meaning the NPCs are just too hard) or some other feature of the dungeon (which can't be identified simply by listing which ones seem hard on parties).
A few other dungeons have spawns that don't go one to one with party size. If these are causing problems then it's probably related to how their stats scale with parties and that's not hard to fix up if I'm at least informed of which encounters are causing wipes.
One thing that doesn't exist here (and never will) is a system that intentionally scales difficulty nonlinearly with party size. It's not like you get one spawn per party member plus they have better stats, it's always one or the other. There are some AI and design choices that are meant to be hard for parties, such as NPCs targeting players by doors for grenades, or some creatures having attacks with splash damage, but these are all localized to certain areas. Because of this there's no master switch that will let me tune the whole server to be easier for parties or harder for parties, and because of that there's really no hope of improving balance without feedback specific to individual dungeons.
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Post by gazoo on May 28, 2017 12:02:52 GMT -5
[Firstly, I'll say thx to PE for hard work and creativity.]
I'll just make a few comments on things that took me a while to fundamentally adapt to. I know there are quite a few newer players who may read this and want to give dungeon feedback.
1. Armor while providing DR, is not like typical DR. It's basically a dice roll for chance of reduction. For example over time 50 armor will statistically stop about twice as much damage as 25 armor. But really bad luck in a combat could make your 50 armor no better than 0 armor. That's where minimum armor comes in; but minimum armor is typically quite small (ie, ~0-3 in passive feats, maybe a couple from items, ~5 from short active feats).
2. Dodge=AC. But it's very difficult to get high AC. At higher levels you might get enough where a mob needs 10 to hit. Typically you trade armor(DR) for dodge(AC), though...you can't really max both.
3. Parry (Block) is actually useful here due to the much smaller max number of attacks on the PW (for both PCs and mobs). However block has the typical drawbacks:
a. max possible attempts = max number attacks(~3)
b. won't stop crit. And here crits have a good chance to confirm, unlike uber AC on typical NWN2 PWs
c. won't stop ranged
3. Healing is sequential, careful, and usually works best in metered, small doses. Unlike PWs where you can just full cure. If your tox goes over top, you enter a stun-like state (comatose), or you die if poisoned. Tox and stamina regenerate slowly during battles.
4. Adding max HP possible due from gaining levels is only possible at the expense of extra stamina (abilities) and extra tox (healing, extra-function-pots, poison, etc). There is usually some compromise depending on your play style.
5. Stealth is mostly for facilitating Sneak attack (Hips break-lock, attack run). It is very, very hard to sneak around in lvl-appropriate areas for extended periods, due to the very tight numbers. Smoke grenades work a bit like Hips, when inside the effect. Do not be surprised to be frequently spotted, when stealthed.
^The above explains why peeps say a tank is fairly essential to survive much of adventuring damage.
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That said, personally I enjoy the dungeons with lots of windy tactical terrain features for the variety in play it allows - for so many of the abilities.
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Post by nippon on May 28, 2017 21:52:19 GMT -5
But really bad luck in a combat could make your 50 armor no better than 0 armor. That's where minimum armor comes in; but minimum armor is typically quite small As a tank, this is the problem. When you look at the numbers it 'seems' like you'll have decent survival ability, but when you tackle difficult content for more than one fight - you're guaranteed to hit that moment when you roll low armor, suffer a crit, then roll low armor again. Or any consecutive bad rolls really. (If it can happen, it 'will') When your tox is high, culm damage is stacked, and halfway through your hp - all it really takes is one. Edit: Lets not get into the 'tactics' of what to do when your tank dies. We're all familiar with the desperate defib play. It's a Hail Mary play and from my experience in 3-5 man groups it rarely works. (You get zapped up, take attacks of opportunity while trying to potion/step away, die again. Rinse and repeat until it works.) |
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Post by Psionic-Entity on May 29, 2017 13:26:03 GMT -5
I don't think it's possible to minmax survivability to the point where you can take all of the damage for a party of 4-5. Every enemy you switch to attacking your tank has its DPS reduced by some fraction, but doing that also helps the enemy team focus fire and means that the hit point and toxicity pools of your other party members aren't contributing anything until your tank dies, which usually means bad news anyways. Prior to the armor update last year tanks would take 20-30% of the damage other teammates would take and this justified having the entire set of spawns for a party of 6+ attacking nothing but your tank. Currently that number is more like 60-80% (better on the first enemy because of parry, worse afterwards) and because of things like strings of critical hits and limited healing it really doesn't make sense to have more than 2-3 players' worth of spawns attacking one character.
That's not to say that content is designed around 1/3 of your party members being heavy armor and shield users, but it definitely wouldn't hurt to have more people who can take hits. Ideally most things that you spawn in difficult dungeons are about evenly matched in 1v1 (which means that running through several 1v1s would be challenging or perhaps lethal for a single PC) and manageable for a party that can use teamwork to get some sort of advantage. In beta and early launch things got a little bit out of control because the teamwork benefits of having 10 enemies attacking a single nearly unkillable PC were so high that it masked the fact that individual spawns would be able to kill just about any PC in 1v1. The intent behind changing armor, block, triage, and enemy stats was to cut down on the magnitude of teamwork benefits so that parties without optimal teamwork compositions could still complete dungeons, while keeping those with a perfect makeup from being able to walk through everything without a challenge.
There's still more work that needs to be done in balancing out dungeons but the last thing I'd want to do is change PC stats in a way that brings back parties of six with a single doorway tank handling all the damage. What I do want to see is the following being roughly the optimal way of handling encounters that spawn 1-1 with players:
- Avoiding doorways because that naturally causes enemies to focus fire one character.
- Non-tank melee characters exchanging blows with one enemy and being able to hold their own.
- Tank characters pulling 2-3 enemies to account for 1-2 flanking, ranged, or support PCs.
Most of the feedback I've had over the past several months has been from players running solo or groups of 2-3, so now that we've been seeing more activity I'm very interested in hearing how viable large groups can be and what kind of tactics actually work in dungeons as they are now (and of course, making some adjustments if the answer is "no tactics").
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Post by neethanial on May 29, 2017 19:48:00 GMT -5
I've been running in larger groups lately, and I have to say the biggest hurdle I've noticed is terrain. Things get cramped quickly, especially when trying to use doorways as bottlenecks. You can't target the npc attacking from the 17th dimension of "I'm inside the door". Ranged character's auto fire has the benefit of not needing to directly target them. After that, feats like dash become absolute necessity in order to participate in combat at all as a melee toon.
After that comes crowd control. Naturally, aoe damage becomes far riskier. Keeping aggro becomes more of a focus, so having multiple people keeping mobs off squishies means less focus fire aimed at the jerk with a trident who's critting your tank for 50+ damage hits. This all becomes overbearingly chaotic when suicide bombers pull the pins on everything they've got left at point blank.
Take all of this into account and add in henchmen who stand by the door in terror because there isn't enough room to work, or worse: They start taunting mobs that are already well under control by pc tanks or off tanks. Npc taunting has caused as many problems as it's fixed. If you want to look anywhere, that might be a good place to start.
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