Berserkers & Cursed: A bit too powerful

[erdraug]

I'm guessing the crystaline crystaline crystaline bug helps weapon-based builds.

[darkgod]

I'm guessing the crystaline crystaline crystaline bug helps weapon-based builds.

None of the winner I checked used it

[Sirrocco]

Another thing to look at is how you want Cursed to play. Cursed play differently than anyone else - that's a big part of their charm. Currently, they constantly hunt to feed their Hate, they're happiest (and, interestingly, safest) when surrounded by the enemy, and they have tremendous defenses. As it turns out, that's a bit much right now, mostly because they're nigh-invulnerable. They need something to tone them down - to make them more vulnerable. The question becomes *when* and *where* you want them to be more vulnerable.

Consider my proposal about cutting down the high-level kill and elite kill hate bonuses, and then making gloom radius hate-based, on a default female Cursed. This does almost nothing to her survivability when at the top of her game, surrounded by enemies. She'll have more hate income than she needs, just from standard kills, so her hate will be hanging out around or above 10, and her gloom radius will be full. She still gets to be the One-Man God of Living Death. On the other hand, in the kill-and-move phase, when not surrounded, her hate is going to be a bit lower, and a bit harder to crank back up again. When she next finds a target, as she's getting swarmed, she's going to be a *lot* more vulnerable - her hate will be lower, with all that entails, and her Gloom won't be fully charged. Her most vulnerable time gets that much more vulnerable. Also, the lives of low-level cursed will be that much harsher, since they're the ones who *can't* maintain hate all that easily. The Cursed themes are kept or strengthened. They're that much more hungry, hunting, and hate-starved, with a marginally more wretched early game. They lose a bit of the invulnerability, but they keep the "happiest when surrounded by the enemy" factor.

On the flip side, my proposal about putting a heal penalty on the lifedrain skill means that the middlegame stays a bit more threatening for them, since they won't be able to use heal/regen to save them if/when they hit a point where their inherent healing isn't enough. It's a relatively minor nerf, all things considered, but it's potentially enough to flip from "alive" to "dead", and it has a side effect of *really* punishing the Cursed who decide to stack on antimagic, just so they can have *more* defenses. If you put the two suggestions together, it starts to have some real bite, since the build-up to full running capacity is the time that Cursed are most going to need their healing infusions.

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On the flip side, if you, say, turn the lifedrain into a "killing field" that deals damage but does not pull life, then you're abandoning a fair bit of the defensive feel of the class. Not only that, but groups of enemies suddenly start being places they might want to avoid. Sure, they like facing one or two constantly, so that they can keep killing, but you don't have the same feel of charging into a mass of enemies and screaming. It feels like that would be something of a loss.

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Oh, and as a different thought - if you had the lifedrain deal low static (willpower-based) damage rather than fractional damage, that might handle our problems pretty well all by itself. It would mean that a sufficiently powerful Cursed would have weak monsters simply die and turn into free HP as he/she walked past (which is cool, if not *all* that meaningful tactically) but that having powerful enemies nearby wouldn't suddenly make you nigh-invincible. Dealing static damage would also mean that the weaker enemies get cleared out quick - which means any stronger enemies can get in close more easily, and that the weaker enemies aren't sitting around being HP batteries while unable to punch through the Cursed's armor. It might be a bit tricky to figure out how much damage to have it do, but making lifedrain damage be based on player stats rather than monster HP would go a *huge* distance towards making the end game challenging without horking over the beginning game or middle game. You'd also get the delightful side effect that suddenly there's a character type who doesn't have to expend any effort on the trivial monsters at *all*. That doesn't mean much from a strategic standpoint (if your lifedrain aura is killing it out of hand, then it's not a threat to begin with) but it's pretty gratifying

[Grey]

Here's another thought - chance Life Leech from a passive to an activated for x turns with a cooldown. This means it can be used tactically without the overpowered feeling that you never need to care about enemies.

However it should still be a set amount based on the player rather than a percentage of the enemy's HP, as Sirocco says.

[Sirrocco]

I'd really rather it not be an active. One of the cool things about the Cursed is that almost all of their utility powers just go. You can potentially fit your entire powerset on a set of 10 hotkeys, including your inscriptions. Having it turn into something that you actually had to remember every time would get pretty annoying.

I might also suggest, if you're changing lifedrain to a static number, that you have it heal only about half of the damage it deals. That way you could potentially have it deal in the 10-20 damage/round range at the higher levels (noticeable for the mid-tier monsters that would be your version of "pathetically weak") without having the healing be all that overwhelming. It also means that you get less total leech HP off of the weaklings before they go down.

As a thought - the only problem with Cursed is that they *are* too powerful. Having them *feel* tremendously powerful for whatever reason (Weaklings wilt and die by the might of your terrible presence!) is all good as long as it doesn't make it too easy to win.

[madmonk]

As a thought - the only problem with Cursed is that they *are* too powerful. Having them *feel* tremendously powerful for whatever reason (Weaklings wilt and die by the might of your terrible presence!) is all good as long as it doesn't make it too easy to win.

I like that thought!

Very interesting discussion by the way! Thank you!

[benli]

So I tried a couple of things to see how it played:
Unnatural Body: about 33% lower life gain from kills; 50% global healing penalty (affects all infusions, regen, etc)
Life Leech: Changed the numbers, but the big one was a cap on healing at a max of about 12/turn

A few thoughts from this:

I like the 50% global healing penalty. It makes life more exciting. Insidious poison would be deadly though. And you can boost it with equipment.

Life leech is ok when its nerfed. Its just a small bonus but may be worth taking. I think it would be fine to use a fixed value rather than %, but it shouldn't matter much.

Bosses and OOD creatures were challenging because of lack of healing. Regen/Heal infusion bosses would stall until hate was 0 and make things impossible.

I think damage and armor is a problem with all fighters. Midgame, fighters become invincible to melee attacks. You can battle 100 similar level creatures and not take a single point of damage. I think this is because of the recent overall damage nerf. Armor values need to be lowered or better yet make it somehow a percentage reduction. Better still, give everything a % armor percing so everything can hurt you. Like DG, I recently played all the way through for the first time. I played a Fighter and only had trouble with: 1) Spellcasters (and really only the Orcs), 2) Bosses with infusions (because I couldn't deal damage fast enough), and 3) wading through every battle without bothering to look at my health (YASD). This is a lot of the same problems Cursed has. Cursed is worse though because it heals and doesn't need to so #3 becomes irrelevant.

As things stand, Unnatural Body healing on Cursed would need to be taken out. It only helps against easy monsters and thats exactly when it is irrelevant. If melee combat can be rebalanced though, I think I like these changes as a start.

[gruevy]

It seems like a good way to check to see if they really are overpowered, or simply easier to build in an effective manner, would be to create and run bots. Design a bot to run around with standardized eq and kill enemies at its level. I won't get much into how this could work, because it'd be a waste of space, but the idea would be to determine how much of the following happens, on avg, per turn, over 100000 turns or something:

1 - damage dealt
2 - damage received
3 - damage avoided
4 - healing from infusions/spells
5 - healing from any other source
6 - whatever else you think of

If you did something like this, you'd have a good idea of how each class balances out in terms of actual power. You'd have to mess around with your bot builds quite a bit to ensure that you're working with the optimal build, but that shouldn't be too hard. For example, if a level 30 berserker takes, and i'm making this up of course, 3 damage per turn, but regenerates, like, 11, then you know you've got a problem. If they deal out 2.5 damage per turn, but an archmage averages 3.5 damage per turn, then it's not as big a problem as it sounds like.

This should be done because it's possible that Cursed and Berserker really aren't overpowered - it's just that the other classes take more skill to build effectively, and no one has figured out how yet. Also, those two classes are a bit more forgiving for people who like to move around fast. It's entirely possible that a careful archmage or summoner or whatever else actually turns out to be more far more invincible if played correctly.

[darkgod]

I stirred a quite interesting discussion, go on

This should be done because it's possible that Cursed and Berserker really aren't overpowered - it's just that the other classes take more skill to build effectively, and no one has figured out how yet. Also, those two classes are a bit more forgiving for people who like to move around fast. It's entirely possible that a careful archmage or summoner or whatever else actually turns out to be more far more invincible if played correctly.

That is not my original point. My point was that playing mindlessly gets you through the hardest part of the game: using 0 talents and just bumping things.
While I'm pretty sure *getting* there is not that easy I am dead certain that I do not want the endgame to feel trivial, this is deceptive both for the player and myself. An archmage or summoner playing carefully turning out invincible (because abusing stuff like PT or whatever) is also wrong but on a much lesser scale, because they they have to think to do it (and one ill turn and they're gone, while cursed & zerkers just can NOT do ill turns)

[gruevy]

Hmm ya, that's a good point. I still think you should do the bot idea to get an idea of balance at some point, but i doubt it will help you solve your current problem, now that I think about it.

EDIT - I know that I switched to playing a berserker because of how outrageously often my mages got one-shotted. I think if you toned down the likelihood of two skeleton archers killing almost anything BUT a berserker or cursed the very same round they come into view (or worse, when you can't even see them) you'd see more classes winning. Hard is one thing, but unpreventable, cheap deaths of low hps characters kind of needs to stop as well.

[madmonk]

It is interesting to examine DG latest graphs.

It clearly shows that the Cursed class has better survivability from level to level as they progress to higher levels. What is not so certain is whether this is true of the Berserker class.

All your suggestions as to how to arrest the Cursed class progression may be unnecessary. You might want to consider how to adjust the graph that DG has presented so that the survivability rate goes down from level to level for the Cursed class.

How this is done will no doubt lead to some interesting discussion, and there are some very good ideas in this thread.

[Grey]

One possibility is to add a class-based xp penalty. With slower levelling it becomes difficult to get as powerful during the various stages of the game.

[darkgod]

Na exp penalty just make stuff more boring, they dont remove the root problem(just like putting big cooldowns on stuff); it just rewards grinding, which I dont want.

(And this is why undeads penalty got a big nerf)

[lintofdeath]

As I said I dont have a problem with some classes being easier, hell I want that.

But Being able to kill the boss of the game without ever using an infusion or even any talents and jump bumping into things is *wrong*.
Being in the swarm of npcs is fine, being in the swarm of npcs and not even carrying is *wrong*.
It looks to me that cursed are quite neat the whole game and then start turning into unstoppable gods of destruction toward the end

Cursed are designed to WANT to be swarmed, unfortunately the way they're encouraged to do so also correlates to why they can stop paying attention. Their life gain on kill and especially their life drain aura are what are key there. If they had a weakness, it'd be a small number of high damage creatures with low max HP that attacked at range (and could STAY at range even when the Cursed closes in). Edit: I actually imagine that everyone who pursues success as a Cursed does everything they can - as I did - to bump health regen. That means talent points, AC, magic items, and battle tactics like killing high HP enemies first and getting swarmed.

Here's a thought: I don't know if it was intentional, but in b19 I noticed that one or two bosses (I specifically remember the freak in Sher'Tul) had an ability (had a big green nova) that disabled the Gloom. That was brilliant. As much as I hated the battle because the boss was nigh unkillable due to healing infusions (70+% HP healed in one round, Jesus Christ), being forced to frequently check that Gloom was running worked wonders for staying alert. Turning on Gloom also costs a turn, which makes that moment all the more critical.

[gruevy]

Another idea is just making elementals and undead immune to any form of life leech, and see how that changes thigns.