Summoning talent levels

[lukep]

Summons are far too powerful at high levels, because most of their attributes scale linearly with talent level, if not exponentially.

NPC's with Summoner skills can become ridiculously powerful. For example, in High Peak, I fought a stair boss that summoned warhounds with 674 strength, giving them about 580 damage per normal attack (through 61 armour, 21% resistance, and 42 power mindslayer shields). One of the Pride Bosses also summoned overpowered enemies, this time Warpers with 60 duration Time Prisons. I hope I never meet an enemy with level 27 summon Spider and 85 Willpower (like the warhound I was fighting), as it would deal 2052 damage per turn for 5 turns with Poison Spit, as well as having huge defence bonuses from its 474 dexterity.

OK, so solutions/ideas:

Not letting enemies get more than 5 raw talent points in a skill, with the rest coming from mastery would help with high talent levels for Flamespitter, Hydra, Warper, Fire Drake, Spider, and invulnerable Turtles, Although this would fix many of the issues I have (along with a couple other changes), I've presented that idea several times before, and it never got much support.

Removing or limiting the attributes that lead to exponential increases in power would make high level (20+) summons less powerful, without affecting lower levels. These are: talent levels in Ranged and Utility summons, and Physical Power for Warhounds.

Changing stat scaling from its current (linear) style, to one with diminishing returns. This would sacrifice clarity in exchange for balance. I don't know how this could be done well, but it would prevent flamespitters with 500 magic and Warhounds with 600 strength from ruining your day.

[tiger_eye]

Changing stat scaling from its current (linear) style, to one with diminishing returns. This would sacrifice clarity in exchange for balance. I don't know how this could be done well, but it would prevent flamespitters with 500 magic and Warhounds with 600 strength from ruining your day.

I think this is the best option, and similar diminishing returns mechanics have been done many other places to encourage diversified builds.

So, perhaps change the scaling portion from: "getWil() * getTalentLevel(t) / 5.0" to something like "0.4 * getWil() * sqrt(getTalentLevel(t))". This keeps the damage between levels 1-6 comparable to the current damage, but it can greatly reduce the damage for high talent levels. For example, with the proposed scaling, a talent at level 25 would be 2.5x less than before.

Oh, and things don't scale exponentially--it's not that broken . The damage done by most summons can scale something like [lvl]^3, though, where lvl is the level of the summoner. Hence, this issue doesn't really show up until you fight really high level summoners.

[Aquillion]

I would be careful about anything that impacts PC summoners, though. My understanding (I've never played a high-level one) is that they're not really that powerful at high levels -- it's just the NPCs with talent levels far beyond what PCs are supposed to be able to get that break the curve.

[bricks]

Capping/diminishing returns on talent level would probably be most appropriate. Really, though, getting talents far beyond level 5 (when they were designed for an adjusted talent level of no more than 6.5) seems like a disaster. Random bosses should be scary because they get a wide variety of skills, not because they hit for irrational amounts of damage.

[lukep]

Oh, and things don't scale exponentially--it's not that broken . The damage done by most summons can scale something like [lvl]^3, though, where lvl is the level of the summoner.

Many don't, but the ranged ones and Warhounds do. For example, Spiders hit for (20 + 15 * talent + WIL/5 * talent ^2 * mastery) poison damage with Poison Spit, which is exponential. Warhounds increase in both Physical Power and Strength with talent level, and most of the ranged attacks scale both with both a stat (boosted linearly with effective talent level), as well as with the level of the attack talent (equal to their raw talent level). Most of these take a square root of the talent and rescale the damage, but I think it is still an exponential increase.

[tiger_eye]

Oh, and things don't scale exponentially--it's not that broken . The damage done by most summons can scale something like [lvl]^3, though, where lvl is the level of the summoner.

Many don't, but the ranged ones and Warhounds do. For example, Spiders hit for (20 + 15 * talent + WIL/5 * talent ^2 * mastery) poison damage with Poison Spit, which is exponential.

Um, last I checked, that's still polynomial scaling, not exponential. I'm a theoretical physicist, so I don't want to hear any "It's considered exponential in game terms" mumbo jumbo . Let's look at the Spit Poison example. The main term scales as [Wil * talent^2]. We can assume that Wil and talent level scales linearly with summoner level, so we can simplify Spit Poison scaling and say it's roughly [lvl]^3, which is what I previously said. Damage from Warhounds is more like [lvl]^2.5.

I've also complained about excessive damage from random guardian summons before, so I'm not going to argue that summons don't need modified. I think they should be. Summoners and their summons were buffed with end-game PC summoners in mind, and I don't think random NPC guardians were carefully considered. Normal NPC summoners and bosses are fine, though, because the talent level of summons scale reasonably and have a maximum level (the highest which is 9 from a non-boss and 12 from a boss).

So, putting a cap of around 10 (or 12) on summon talents may be the most fair and simple thing to do.

[tiger_eye]

Okay, we investigated and discussed this over on IRC, so let me rehash the issue then propose a simple solution.

As above, let's consider the Spit Poison talent, which is used not only by summoned spiders, but other spiders, nagas, multi-hued drakes, and a horror. The total damage from Spit Poison is "20 + Dex * tl * 0.8", where "tl" is talent level. Hence, the talent scales as [ Dex * tl ], and both of those factors scale linearly for non-summoned npcs.

Summoned npcs are different, though. Their Dex stat scales as [ Wil * tl ], where "Wil" is the willpower of the summoner and "tl" is the talent level of the summon. Furthermore, the talent level for Spit Poison is equal to the talent level of the summon. Therefore, the damage from Spit Poison scales as [ Wil * tl^2 ]. Note that "tl" is squared, unlike the damage from non-summoned npcs.

Nearly all talents for summons are like this, and they become ridiculous for high talent levels (Minotaur is the exception, though, because the levels for its talents are fixed).

The simplest solution is to make the primary stat scale mostly from Wil. For example, for spiders, Dex could be changed from "dex=15 + self:getWil() * self:getTalentLevel(t) / 5" to "dex=15 + self:getWil(60, true)", and this would fix the insane damage from Spit Poison and would bring all damage scaling done from talents by summoned animals more in line with their non-summoned brethren.

If you still need convincing, I hope lukep will further explain just how quickly damage from Spit Poison (and other talents) can become crazy. Oh, and scaling of Str and combat.dam for melee summons such as War Hounds should probably be scaled back too.

[lukep]

Here's the damage data I gathered. All of this is for 60 WIl, 1.3 mastery. Spider is Spit Poison, Hydra is Acid Breath, and for comparison, Sand Breath (at 60 STR, 1.0 Mastery)

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level     Spider      Hydra     Sand Breath
1         45          68        90
5         396         239       168
10        1396        489       223
15        3020        770       264
20        5268        1075      298
25        8140        1398      328
30        11636       1737      354
35        15756       2090      378
40        20500       2453      401
45        25868       2827      421
50        31860       3210      441

Spider is an outlier, and scales far faster than other summons, Hydra's Acid Breath is fairly representative of all of the ranged Summons, and Sand Breath is fairly representative of player talents.

[Ploppy]

Changing stat scaling from its current (linear) style, to one with diminishing returns.

I would enjoy this too. Some stats already operate off a version of this (a character's main stats will always be more important during the early levels, when they're necessary to unlock vital skills; a few points in constitution are basically mandatory at low level, but might be pointless at level 40), so a well-considered change to high level gains shouldn't seem too counterintuitive.

[marvalis]

The simplest solution is to make the primary stat scale mostly from Wil. For example, for spiders, Dex could be changed from "dex=15 + self:getWil() * self:getTalentLevel(t) / 5" to "dex=15 + self:getWil(60, true)", and this would fix the insane damage from Spit Poison and would bring all damage scaling done from talents by summoned animals more in line with their non-summoned brethren.

Summons used to be capped at 100 for every stat, like other NPC's. This limit has been removed because this provided a hard cap to the damage of a summoner.
The summons where balanced with a level 50 player in mind. For a level 50 summoner with a raw talent of 5.0 and a modifier of 1.3 things should remain the same.

It would be best to implement diminishing returns:
The stat gain for a summon should have diminishing returns for the summoner his talent level
The talent level of the summon should have diminishing returns in function of the summoner his talent level

Probably something with a sigmoid function. This math is used a lot in physics . I'm sure tiger_eye can pull something out of his head.

[tiger_eye]

*bump*

High level summons can still be friggin' unfair. Here is a not-so-high but still very dangerous war hound that I just encountered. It's only level 36!

war_hound.png (104.89 KiB) Viewed 2067 times

[supermini]

I wish I saved some screenshots from the ID run. Summoners along with cursed are the most dangerous thing there when you get past level 50.

[Hachem_Muche]

I'm glad I re-spotted this thread. After the switch from wil to mindpower in b43, I disabled the diminishing returns for summons stat scaling in Infinite500 to see how effective the new change would be, but it seems like I should it put it back in. In the war hound case this changes strength from

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15 + (self:mindCrit(self:combatMindpower(2)) * self:getTalentLevel(t) / 5) + (self:getTalentLevel(t) * 2)

to

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15 + (self:mindCrit(self:combatMindpower(2)) * 0.299*self:getTalentLevel(t)^.75) + (self:getTalentLevel(t) * 2)

adhering to the rule of conserving talent effectiveness at talent level 5 with will = 100. It appears that, based on the level 36 example, a straight up nerf may be needed here, though.

Note that the stat scaling is effectively a linear conversion (with an increasing small multiplier), and so the first formula is ~O(cl^2) while the second is still ~O(cl^1.75), at least for npcs. (cl = character level) Also, the strength stat is passed through the stat scaling formula again to produce the attack power that translates into melee damage.