Hate ideas

[Infinitum]

Currently having a few problems with the Hate mechanic in the game, namely in that it's conceptually close to Vim (using enemies to generate resources) and the constant drain actively discouraging the player to use the autoexplore feature. It's not a big deal mind as enough hate is generally generated in combat to compensate, but it still irks me that using the z button deprives me of a few ability usages each combat.

So, anyhow, proposed change: remove the player's hate bar altogether and instead have each individual enemy have a separate bar showing how much that particular one is hated by the PC. The core concept remains similar in that each offensive action the enemy takes (attacking, using abilities, continued existence etc) increases the the creatures hate bar which in turn makes the PC's hate abilities more potent versus that creature. Attacking the creature (by bumping or using abilities on it) or having it leave line of sight in turn decreases its hate levels. Actual usage of hatred abilities wouldn't consume any resources at all except for the cooldown (albeit at 0 hatred they wouldn't be very effective at all).

Obviously this would necessitate retooling pretty much every talent inherent to what amount to perfectly playable classes for dubious gains. It would however help differentiate Afflicted characters further, both thematically and gameplay-wise as they would have to juggle their offensive ability usage between multiple mobs in order to preserve optimal hatred levels as well as weighing this against the need to reduce incoming damage by focusing on single enemies.

Thoughts?

[supermini]

I never really had a problem with using autoexplore on either cursed or doomed. Your hate goes down to one half of what it was when you were last in combat. Also, when your hate gets low, it starts going down very very slowly, so you're always able to use a few abilities unless you really tank down to 0. I found I was usually at around 30 on my hate bar after autoexploring.

Did you go down below 10 too often or?

[jotwebe]

Well it used to be pretty unforgiving, right now hate stabilizes at a high enough level that you're not completely screwed if autoexplore turns back from a door at the end of a long corridor.

So it's actually pretty much fixed right now.

It's a good point about the similarity to vim, although for some reason they have always felt rather different. I guess it has to do with hate being gained by a lot of small things apart from killing stuff: getting hit hard, hitting stuff hard, getting low on health... it feels very organic and intuitive in play, while with vim I get into a very calculating min/maxing mindset.

Maybe to take that a bit further, we could slightly decrease hate gains on kills (to base 6 instead of 8, maybe) and give out hate for dealing out big wounds and getting hurt more often, and hand out low HP hate earlier. Maybe hate for crits, too?

That said, the individualized hate bars do sound interesting. I don't see how bump attacks should cost hate though - they don't cost any under the current system.

How do you propose handling area attacks like Creeping Dark?

[Infinitum]

Did you go down below 10 too often or?

Very rarely. Otoh, those few points of hate might very well be the difference between 2 or 3-shotting something, and no other class actively loses out by playing lazily (except the occasional instant death).

That said, the individualized hate bars do sound interesting. I don't see how bump attacks should cost hate though - they don't cost any under the current system.

Stress relief. Mainly because it'd be thematically coherent (damage in-damage out etc).

How do you propose handling area attacks like Creeping Dark?

Base damage multiplied by a factor governed by hate level? Pretty sure the engine should be able to handle that what with it already calculating resistances on an individual basis etc.

[ironroby]

I would like for hate to go down, each time you kill an enemy and then regenerate when you are not reveling in your hate, by slaughtering everybody.

I think that hate would fit more as something that comes from inside of you and is "soothed" each time you relive it, aka kill something.

I think that looking for a "release" would fit the serial-killer-like Afflicted better than being some sort of an actual psychological energy vampire.


If that's do much of a fundamental change, then I would like at least some skill that would allow you to keep a percentage of your hate as a reserve, like the Anorithil can with Twilight. Because I like to explore very much and I hate the "each step is a waste" issue.

[Zonk]

I would like for hate to go down, each time you kill an enemy and then regenerate when you are not reveling in your hate, by slaughtering everybody.

I think that hate would fit more as something that comes from inside of you and is "soothed" each time you relive it, aka kill something.

I think that looking for a "release" would fit the serial-killer-like Afflicted better than being some sort of an actual psychological energy vampire.


If that's do much of a fundamental change, then I would like at least some skill that would allow you to keep a percentage of your hate as a reserve, like the Anorithil can with Twilight. Because I like to explore very much and I hate the "each step is a waste" issue.

Oh...VERY interesting flavor! Keeping your enemies alive longer instead of killing them as fast as possible....'making them suffer'...sounds very fitting.

As for keeping a % of your max hate as a reserve, wasn't there a Seethe talent that worked exactly like that once, giving you hate regen as long as you were below a certain %?

[Velorien]

Oh...VERY interesting flavor! Keeping your enemies alive longer instead of killing them as fast as possible....'making them suffer'...sounds very fitting.

Consider the gameplay implications, however. Every turn an enemy stays alive is a turn in which they can attack you, debuff you, buff themselves, use a talent for massive burst damage, summon allies and cool down their best abilities. There's a reason the two main combat strategies are "kill it fast before it can kill you" and "hit and run".

[HousePet]

Seethe knocked off some of your hate, stopped it degenerating, caused any hate income to quickly decay and reduced your damage.
Looks terrible to me.

I've always found Hate a bit wierd that it is gained by killing and I feel it is too close to Vim.

I would like it more if you gained hate from taking damage, rather than kills.

You already do get some bonus hate from taking high damage, and when you meet a powerful creature. These, particularly the latter, look like they might have been added to make it possible to survive boss battles, which you would normally have no way of regenerating hate in.

[benli]

I've been getting back into Tome a bit now that 1.0 is out. There were a few things I had on my todo list for the afflicted classes and one of them was to experiment with hate a bit. I think it's OK for doomed, but I ran a Cursed winner recently and pretty much never looked at what my hate was the whole game. This is more or less what I wanted to try to fix that:

The original purpose of hate was to force you into combat faster than you would like. It gives the player a need to kill (like a Cursed). Long running consumables are pretty much gone from the game so that doesn't work any more. Hate would work better as a short-term consumable that achieves this "rush to kill" feel at the level of an individual battle.

1. When idle, your hate will sit at 0.
2. Hate grows very quickly when in combat. Maybe +10/turn for a certain threshold of damage inflicted or received, +20/kill, etc.
3. Hate falls very quickly. Maybe -5/turn or -10/turn when you haven't gained any for 3 turns.
4. Talent use does not reduce hate, but some may require a threshold. So blindside might work at 0 hate, but rampage might require you to be at 40+ hate to activate it.
5. Many more talents should scale power off hate so you come into combat cold and become a killing machine the longer you fight.

This allows for auto-explore (since hate falls to 0 pretty much immediately) and some pretty interesting tactics in battle. I think this is similar to the idea of having a hate bar on every creature, but it is simpler and rewards you regardless of whether you are fighting a lot of weaker enemies or one tough one.

The hate part is pretty easy to modify, but this requires some changes to the talents. I've been putting together another addon (an afflicted-themed dungeon), but I might give this a try at some point to see if it plays ok.

[ironroby]

This allows for auto-explore (since hate falls to 0 pretty much immediately) and some pretty interesting tactics in battle. I think this is similar to the idea of having a hate bar on every creature, but it is simpler and rewards you regardless of whether you are fighting a lot of weaker enemies or one tough one.

Looks wonderful! It eliminates a huge amount of gameplay annoyance and still keeps hate as a uniquely working resource.

[supermini]

1. When idle, your hate will sit at 0.
2. Hate grows very quickly when in combat. Maybe +10/turn for a certain threshold of damage inflicted or received, +20/kill, etc.
3. Hate falls very quickly. Maybe -5/turn or -10/turn when you haven't gained any for 3 turns.
4. Talent use does not reduce hate, but some may require a threshold. So blindside might work at 0 hate, but rampage might require you to be at 40+ hate to activate it.
5. Many more talents should scale power off hate so you come into combat cold and become a killing machine the longer you fight.

I can see that working for a tanky class but in practice I don't think it would work very well for cursed. Early on you are too fragile to stay long in combat, and later on you're killing stuff too fast. That implementation also has the problem that it takes time to use your most powerful abilities, and those are more useful at the start of the combat, which is the most dangerous part.

With the current implementation of rampage, you'd just end up bumping stuff even more, and that's the most boring way to play a class (and cursed suffer from this more than most).

In short, to implement that idea you'd have to completely change how cursed work. Which is too bad, because they are quite fun death machines once they get going. Rampage passive trigger chance might need looking at though, as it's too high.

[SageAcrin]

Also, it means that Cursed is, in practice, a -50% healing modifier class almost none of the time in practice, unless that is altered.

And in the most heavy combat against grunt enemies, you have Unnatural Body's regen, so that's rather weirdly overkill. So that means that you'd have to set things up so that you don't hit high Hate against bosses, or else the mechanic is literally just annoying for out of battle healing.

I think changing that to a different penalty, or scrapping it, might be the best idea in that case. Especially with damage talents scaling off Hate, that's probably enough of a penalty for starting out at 0 so often.

I'm not as negative on the idea as supermini, but that might be because I see a simple solution to the problem of not being able to use the skills at the battle start.

Implement Hate scaling on all skills and make Hate no longer an actual cost.

Now, Hate is not a "resource" in a traditional sense, but instead the power fueling your skills.

This fits much better, thematically, to me than constantly consuming Hate. Going on a rampage and hacking everything around you up makes you less angry? That's weird.

However, if you're really angry, you can go on a rampage better? That makes sense. And cooldowns are there to prevent constant spamming.

From there, it's a matter of making some skills scale less or more based on Hate. The ones that scale less, that are better at lower Hate, become the obvious buttons to use at a battle start, to work up to the other skills.

You wouldn't even have to change Doomed for this, if you want, either. Them using the resource differently would be reasonable, thematically(they definitely do things differently from Cursed, thematics-wise, and maybe actually getting less angry is reasonable for their theme). Of course, I'm not saying you shouldn't, either.

[jotwebe]

I've been getting back into Tome a bit now that 1.0 is out.

Awesome!

1. When idle, your hate will sit at 0.
2. Hate grows very quickly when in combat. Maybe +10/turn for a certain threshold of damage inflicted or received, +20/kill, etc.
3. Hate falls very quickly. Maybe -5/turn or -10/turn when you haven't gained any for 3 turns.
4. Talent use does not reduce hate, but some may require a threshold. So blindside might work at 0 hate, but rampage might require you to be at 40+ hate to activate it.
5. Many more talents should scale power off hate so you come into combat cold and become a killing machine the longer you fight.

Sound interesting. Be sure to release it in an addon (early and often!)

I think this is similar to the idea of having a hate bar on every creature, but it is simpler and rewards you regardless of whether you are fighting a lot of weaker enemies or one tough one.

Note that the OP's idea doesn't necessarily do that. The way I understand it he wants to essentially make hate something like the Stalking skill, only that it's able to be applied to more than one enemy at a time.

So if you were fighting a wyrm with a couple of drakes, under your systen you could use the drakes to ramp up your hate for the big fight, while under the proposed one you'd want to grow the hate bar on the wyrm as soon as possible.

[NEHZ]

Doesn't that already work that way somewhat with the stalking skill? I agree with OP in at least one thing though: it always struck me as odd that hate works the way it does. It's hate, not rage. So why does it diminish out of combat? Sure, hate can lead to ragefull slaughter, but it can also lead to cold blooded stalking and assasination. The skill trees certainly give you that choise.
Seperate bars for every enemy, however, looks way cumbersome. Besides, cursed also live in a kind of permenant hatred towards the whole world.

Here is my suggestion:
Hate fills out of combat
Hate fills when you take damage
Hate fills when you miss an attack
Hate diminishes when you deal damage
Hate diminishes when you kill
Hate stalls when you see enemies but don't attack
High hate lowers your healrate rather than the other way around
Every time your hate diminishes, you heal a bit

This way, you can use your high hate skills at the start of a battle and you'll want to kill everything as quickly as possible to heal. You've got hate and it fuels your attacks, but at the same time you rush to lower it to survive. Think that that fits the theme of wallowing in hate, considering that hate has a self-destructive nature.

[supermini]

I'm not as negative on the idea as supermini, but that might be because I see a simple solution to the problem of not being able to use the skills at the battle start.

Implement Hate scaling on all skills and make Hate no longer an actual cost.

Now, Hate is not a "resource" in a traditional sense, but instead the power fueling your skills.

This fits much better, thematically, to me than constantly consuming Hate. Going on a rampage and hacking everything around you up makes you less angry? That's weird.

However, if you're really angry, you can go on a rampage better? That makes sense. And cooldowns are there to prevent constant spamming.

From there, it's a matter of making some skills scale less or more based on Hate. The ones that scale less, that are better at lower Hate, become the obvious buttons to use at a battle start, to work up to the other skills.

That's an interesting idea, but if hate is just something that naturally builds up during the fight and no abilities use it up, then you'd hit the same problem that we have now - cursed would simply not pay attention to the hate bar at all. It would just be a generic damage modifier. You'd have to have some skills costing hate and some giving more hate to add a strategic element to it.

One idea would be to make rampage really good at generating hate to encourage people to use it early in the fight and then they can use that hate as fuel to run their other abilities after the rampage has worn off. Closers (blindside and reckless charge) would have to have no hate cost, and they could even give you a small amount of hate.

You wouldn't even have to change Doomed for this, if you want, either. Them using the resource differently would be reasonable, thematically(they definitely do things differently from Cursed, thematics-wise, and maybe actually getting less angry is reasonable for their theme). Of course, I'm not saying you shouldn't, either.

If you look at doomed winners (and this has been my experience with them too), they can get away with using just one talent level of feed. I'd say they probably need their hate mechanic looked at as well.