Too many damage types?

[edge2054]

Yeah, I have no idea why paradox is so common on ego weapons. I'd personally like to see it buffed and much less common.

[Canderel]

Generally I totally agree... Too many damage types, and probably IMO too many status effects.

Especially diseased/cursed/stunned/dazed/poisoned/paralysed/hexed/fear*/bleeding/pinned/frozen/burning.... ? More?

*: Fear is resisted by skeletons, but I am not sure how many enemies can cause fear.

I am also uncertain as to how many has "immunities" tied to them... But many of them can be bundled together too.

Diseased/Cursed/Hexed/Poisoned/Bleeding seems related or similar (though curse and hex to a lesser degree).
Stunned/Dazed/Fear/Pinned/Paralysed/Frozen* seems related or similar.

Many of them could be combined into a couple of immunities... *: I am not so sure frozen should be part of that group (even though it currently is bundled with them in the game).

[marvalis]

Commonly used - physical, fire, nature, cold, lightning, blight
Rarer - arcane, acid, light, darkness, temporal, mind

I can't help but wonder: how the hell do you do nature damage to something? What does that even mean? Remove nature damage, remove acid damage, remove blight damage, merge them all into physical.

Temporal and mind damage should not be on weapons or items. remove it completely. Arcane should be very very rare (or non-existent) on weapons. The idea that a dagger somehow does temporal damage seems very out of place and makes no sense at all to me. It these damage types are exotic then I do not see why a player should worry about it. If all resist mind, arcane, temporal items are removed then they will not appear on the player resistance screen and they will not be a problem.

Physical damage should be the most common one, but should not easily be resisted. This is the 'default' damage. IMHO things like spiders should do physical damage and nature damage should be removed. Perhaps physical resistance on items should be reduced a bit, and then there is always the question of how armor should work.

Thematic resistance (fire, cold, ...) can be interesting, but should have a limit (like the current 70% resist limit, but it seems a bit high). It should be very hard to become immune (but perhaps possible during some story lines). This is more a question of story and game progression than game-play and depends mostly on the dungeon design. These damage types should be as rare as possible in order to keep it thematic (this is why physical has to be the most common one).

Light/dark can be merged in fire/cold I suppose. Call it holy fire or whatever :3.

This would leave us with:

Commonly used - physical
Thematic: fire, cold, lightning
Irresistible: arcane, temporal, mind

Only physical, fire, cold and lightning would ever appear on equipment. This is much cleaner. cold and ice should be merged.

Again I have to think of magicka, where the elements are made not by thinking about damage type, but about how different effects could work together. This is IMHO much more interesting to the game-play than just a bunch of different damage types. This is perhaps why Grey feels that there is no point to having these damage types, they do not affect gameplay. Perhaps moving toward a system like magicka could be an interesting way to expand the gameplay options players have.
In magicka, for example, you can first make things wet by doing water element, and then freeze them by doing cold damage. In TOME, for example, you could have a status effect 'wet' cause by a spell called 'hailstorm': Physical damage+makes things wet. Then you do cold damage => things are frozen for a number of turns turns. This would make the cold damage type significant in terms of gameplay. It would also make cold damage very strong when it is raining outside!

If we want to further simplify resistances, then I think we should remove physical resistance. Your armor is your physical resistance! Yes, physical resistance does not make sense to me. Physical damage should not even have a name, it should just be called damage, and it should be reduced by your armor. Nice and simple.

Armor: all normal damage
Resistances: fire, cold, lightning
Irresistible: arcane, temporal, mind

In general I think more enemies should have regular attacks that use a different damage type than physical. These would make resistances much more important.

I do not understand, wasn't your whole point that there are to many different kinds of damage types? How will adding more different types to monsters help here? Instead of giving more creatures nature and blight damage, we merge them into physical. If there are to many different kinds of resists, then the player is not going to bother with them. Carrying around a bunch of different resist items is also not exactly my idea of fun. Having a kit of fire/cold/electricity seems more than enough. That means 3 different sets of equipment. Add to this all the effect resistances and you end up with to much information ^_^. IMHO these effects resistances should be removed but that is another topic :3.

[marvalis]

Now we are talking about items and resistances and stuff, why do guys in RPG's always look like this?

aToME4.jpg (48.02 KiB) Viewed 3346 times

[Obsidian]

I always assumed Nature damage was poisons, acids, decay, the various elements of life, in hostile form. I say leave nature.

[Grey]

Nature is a force in Maj'Eyal. If arcane stays then so should nature :)

[marvalis]

I always assumed Nature damage was poisons, acids, decay, the various elements of life, in hostile form. I say leave nature.

Ok but let me play the devil's advocate for a moment:
If you want to leave it in, can you give a good reason to do so (gameplay-wise)? I mean, what makes it really different from physical damage? In fact, is there a difference? Both are affected by armor as far as i can see. The only difference seems to be thematically. Should each 'theme' have its own damage type? What does it add to the game in terms of 'fun' to leave it in?

I am not saying you should do A or B, just thinking out loud about it.

Nature is a force in Maj'Eyal. If arcane stays then so should nature

Ok, but does that mean it needs it's own damage type. Maybe it does, maybe not, but it does not seem to automatically follow from it.

[bricks]

I always assumed Nature damage was poisons, acids, decay, the various elements of life, in hostile form. I say leave nature.

Ok but let me play the devil's advocate for a moment:
If you want to leave it in, can you give a good reason to do so (gameplay-wise)? I mean, what makes it really different from physical damage? In fact, is there a difference? Both are affected by armor as far as i can see. The only difference seems to be thematically. Should each 'theme' have its own damage type? What does it add to the game in terms of 'fun' to leave it in?

I am not saying you should do A or B, just thinking out loud about it.

Nature is a force in Maj'Eyal. If arcane stays then so should nature

Ok, but does that mean it needs it's own damage type. Maybe it does, maybe not, but it does not seem to automatically follow from it.

Yeah, I'd say that the damage types actually do thematically define the classes, and they make the monsters more interesting, too. Without Blight, Temporal, or Light/Darkness there'd be six classes that lose a lot of flavor and uniqueness.

If it's a matter of too many resistances to gather, do what was done with status effects, and group them into physical, magical, mental and other. There will be lots in physical and magical, a few special ones in other (perhaps Arcane and Temporal would fit well there, as they are "magical" but require special resistances), and really only the one for mental, but conceivably other mind-based classes are in the works. Enemies could still get specific resistances (blight for worm masses, fire for fire drakes, acid for wretchlings, etc.) but the player could focus on accumulating resistance gear for a specific type of threat and special equipment/egos/artifacts could still target single damage types.

[benli]

What if damage types were broken out the way effects were as physical, mental, spell, and other. The different flavors of damage could be variations that are resisted in very special cases (fire drakes, shield of the dragon, etc).

Natural Damage: physical, fire, lightning, acid, cold, nature, blight, temporal
Mental Damage: mind
Spell Damage: arcane, darkness, light
Other: instakill, etc.

Each category of damage could have its own "armor". Natural damge uses equipped armor like it is now, Mental uses mental save as armor and Spell uses spell save as armor. The "other" damage category would not be affected by armor. Some specific types of damage could potentially have some armor piercing.

There is something RPGish about putting together a specific kit for fighting that fire-breathing dragon that would be lost with a change like this. On the other hand, having a single artifact helmet you can slap on is sounds a lot more fun than a mix-and-match kit that takes forever to assemble.

[Grey]

Ok but let me play the devil's advocate for a moment:
If you want to leave it in, can you give a good reason to do so (gameplay-wise)? I mean, what makes it really different from physical damage? In fact, is there a difference? Both are affected by armor as far as i can see. The only difference seems to be thematically. Should each 'theme' have its own damage type? What does it add to the game in terms of 'fun' to leave it in?

Poison is unaffected by armour. Indeed I'm not sure of any situation where nature damage is affected by armour. Nature resistance as it is in the game serves as a method for poison defence. I think the only non-poison nature damage is slime, so I guess it could be changed to physical and nature renamed poison.

[Aquillion]

Confirmed. Armor is a product of 'how' not 'what'. If the how is a weapon attack (rather that weapon is a bow, a sword, or a dragon's claws) armor works. Even if that how's what is Arcane, Fire, or Temporal.

Melee project ignores armor though.

Huh. The tooltip for armor needs to be corrected, then, IIRC.

For temporal: Leave it as it is. The fact that Chronomancy classes do their own weird kind of damage that nobody else interacts with is part of their theme. However, I'll reiterate that I feel that part of the problem is egos that have blurred this line -- I suggest eliminating all temporal egos. If this leaves chronomancy classes too weakened, buff them in some way to make up for it. But I think that in general temporal damage should almost be a "secret" outside of the Temporal Rift and a few other places; likewise, Mind damage should mostly be a secret (even moreso, because it's not listed anywhere) -- conceptually, an adventurer that encounters one of those should be shocked and have no idea how they're damaging him.

Mind, especially. The fact that there's no resist for it is both important mechanically and important thematically -- it's the Lovecraftian horror thing, the idea that they're in your head and your armor and defenses aren't helping you at all. Mind damage should be rare but terrifying, especially to those with a low mind power.

I sort of like the idea of removing absolutely all +% temporal damage, because that would force chronomancy classes to use other sorts of criteria for choosing weapons. It feels, somewhat, as if temporal damage equips were added in a burst of badly-considered "equivalence", just because other damage types have them. That's a mistake -- I don't feel that we need to remove too many damage types; but it's important to make them more unique in terms of how they play.

(Artifacts can be exceptions, because artifacts should be strange and unusual -- there should be at least one temporal-damage inflicting / boosting artifact, maybe more if you want a staff and a blade, or make it a blade with low str requirements that boosts spellpower so it's useful to both chronomantic classes. But nowhere else.)


I'm mostly skeptical about the others. My gut instinct tells me that the problem here is more ego types than it is damage types; none of the classes are broken, and several of the suggestions here (most of them, in fact) have potentially drastic implications for classes, abilities, and monsters that are not broken right now.

Don't fix what isn't broken. Focus on tweaking the egos, not the entire system. In particular, I suggest making +% damage much much more rare for most types of damage -- originally, I think it was just intended for archmages and alchemists. I'd remove it from nearly every damage type that archmages and alchemists don't use (except maybe physical, and on some rare artifacts), and if that leaves some classes too weak, buff them to make up for it.


For resistances, I've got a different suggestion: Make resistances reduce the duration of associated status ailments. This will kill two birds with one stone, making resistances more important and dealing with often overpowered status ailments by giving players more options to confront them. It'll also add clear distinctions between resistance types -- cold resistance becomes much more valuable and interesting if it defends against freeze, say.

[edge2054]

Mostly my suggestion about grouping damage types was because I'd like to see less of this. I guess another way to go about it would be to reduce the amount of junk egos by merging them into groups so they're not so junky (both for resists and damage) and at this point in the discussion that's my suggestion on the best way to fix this because it really is the heart of the problem.

Even though these are green they're still crap and in my mind all they're really doing is polluting the drop tables with stuff that most people won't use. And the damage type doesn't matter. If you're playing a mage the blight, light, darkness, nature, and temporal egos are all equally useless (and probably half the 'mage' ones are too depending on how you're spending your talent points). If you're playing a paradox mage then everything but temporal is useless. If you're playing a corruptor then everything except blight is useless. All of this stuff could be consolidated into a couple of egos so the chances of a character finding one they'll actually use would be much better.

I don't think taking an axe to 'temporal' egos is really going to fix this.

Code: Select all

	name = "magma ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.FIRE] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
	},

	name = "temporal ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.TEMPORAL] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
	},

	name = "icy ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.COLD] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
	},

	name = "acidic ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.ACID] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
	},

	name = "crackling ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.LIGHTNING] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
	},

	name = "naturalist ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.NATURE] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
	},

	power_source = {arcane=true},
	name = "blighted ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.BLIGHT] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
       },

	name = "sunbathed ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.LIGHT] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
	},

	name = "shadow ", prefix=true, instant_resolve=true,
	wielder = {
		inc_damage={ [DamageType.DARKNESS] = resolvers.mbonus_material(25, 8), },
	},

[lukep]

I think that making egos that affect multiple damage types is the right way to go here, for both damage and resistance. Some ideas:

Nightmarish: Mind, Darkness
Hellish: Fire, Darkness
Solar: Fire, Light
Disintegrating: Acid, Blight, Temporal
Elemental: Fire, Cold, Acid, Lightning
Void: Darkness, Temporal, Cold
Thermal: Fire, Cold
Shearing: Temporal, Physical
Ethereal: Arcane, Temporal, Mind

and so on. I realize that this list isn't the most thematic or balanced, but it would make more equipment valuable for more classes.

[edge2054]

I think that making egos that affect multiple damage types is the right way to go here, for both damage and resistance. Some ideas:

Nightmarish: Mind, Darkness
Hellish: Fire, Darkness
Solar: Fire, Light
Disintegrating: Acid, Blight, Temporal
Elemental: Fire, Cold, Acid, Lightning
Void: Darkness, Temporal, Cold
Thermal: Fire, Cold
Shearing: Temporal, Physical
Ethereal: Arcane, Temporal, Mind

and so on. I realize that this list isn't the most thematic or balanced, but it would make more equipment valuable for more classes.

Aye, this is the kind of line I was suggesting (though I couldn't come up with anything beyond Elemental).

To add another one.

Prismatic: Light, Dark

I realize that some of this encroaches on greater egos but the difference could be that greater egos offer better bonuses as well as added stuff. For instance we could have a Hellfire Ego (Fire/Darkness) and a Greater Hellfire Ego that gives fire and darkness damage, resist, and resist penetration or could even give interesting on equip effects like special status effects (like the new spellshocks and what not) when dealing either of these damage types. This could go right down the line for all staves and into other equipment.

Even a lot of the new greater ego weapons just are more of the same rather then being something new and better. A temporal weapon ego should give temporal damage on hit but a greater ego that's doing paradox damage needs to be doing something a lot more interesting then just damage in my opinion. Slime and Icy are good examples of how greater ego elemental projects should be in my opinion (or even lesser egos because melee_project on it's own just really isn't all that interesting). Thunder egos should do a baby stun, Caustic should blind or sunder armor, Paradox could apply a debuff that rearranges the targets stats or resists. And all of this could be worked into the new cross-tier effects system that's in the SVN so that it's not just a gimme. Imagine how much more fun finding a Blazebringer weapon would be if it inflicted a two turn Flameshock on your enemy every time you created a cross-tier effect or created an inferno in a radius around the target.

For resist gear there's already some of this going on thematically even on greens. We just need to expand on this philosophy so that greens aren't just junk and that offensive stuff is more valuable to more classes and resist gear covers a broader more thematic range of effects.

Anyway, I'm rambling and got off on a tangent. All I'm really saying is that the ego tables at this point are to specific for +damage stuff and +resists and not diverse enough for the greater egos. There's potential for diversity there but all that diversity is really doing right now is returning different colors to our game logs rather then the interesting fun stuff it could be doing.

[Aquillion]

I dislike this suggestion because it makes everyone use equipment the same way, which is boring.

I still feel that elemental bonuses were originally intended primarily for archmages and alchemists, and should be reserved for them. I would completely remove not only temporal, but also blight, light, darkness, and nature egos. The remaining ones will sometimes be useless to certain characters, but no moreso than mana regen or anything like that.

And absolutely no to any ego that influences mind damage in any way. Mind damage is supposed to be special and strange and surprising when you encounter it.

It feels like the suggestions here are all going in exactly the wrong direction -- trying to roll every damage type together so they can all be treated in the exact same bland generic way, with the only difference between a Paradox Mage, an Archmage, and a Corruptor, equipment-wise, being the color of the equipment they want.

That's terrible and undesirable. Murder all non-artifact % bonuses that don't apply to basic mage elements or to physical; note that the mage elements are the most common. Classify all other elements as special and strictly forbid bonuses to them that don't come from artifacts. Balance the classes that lose equipment options to this in other ways to make them more unique.

Don't make everyone go for +% equipment to their chosen damage type. That's booooring. Make the +% equipment thing mostly for archmages and alchemists, with some other classes affected tangentially (because those are the most common elements, after all.) Provide equipment support to other classes in other, more interesting ways, rather than just cloning archmage mechanics onto all equipment the way it is now.

Also, note an important point -- archmages have to choose what elements to focus on, but can always learn new ones. This makes +% things interesting to them, because you might want to change the direction of your build if you find new things -- it becomes a choice. +% to all archmage skills would not be a choice, it'd be boring.

Likewise, +% temporal stuff is not a choice. It's a glaringly obvious thing for any Chronomancy class. It's a no-brainer, and those are boring. Same for blight and corruptors. Those bonuses shouldn't exist, outside of unique artifacts -- if you introduce them, they make equipment selection for the related classes too boring.

Listen to me, listen to me. I know you all feel that there's too much archmage equipment and all that (and yeah, it's true). But different-colored +% equipment for everyone was the wrong way to go. That's the real problem here. Take away the +% blight, +% chronomancy, +% darkness and light. Replace them with, for instance, egos sculpted towards the stat and equipment requirements of those classes in a more general sense, without the glaring hammer-to-the-forehead lack of subtly that a +% bonus that affects nearly an entire class and only that class provides.

Making them general wouldn't be solving the problem, it would be enshrining it. It'd make every damage type more boring and would make equipment selection in general more boring across classes, contributing to making every class play the same way.