Share your ideas for balancing things

[Nimbostratus]

This thread is for any neat ideas you want to share about balancing. Preferably the ideas that you might not think of right away.



I. The problem of speed > power
A lot of the "slow but powerful" skills are totally outclassed by their faster counterparts. Usually, this comes down to the "weak" ones doing more damage per second simply because they hit so much faster. Other than the obvious choices of slowing them down or otherwise directly weakening them...

1. Make crushing blow or any super-powered CTCs harder to have.

2. A more interesting one, I think, is to give a few monsters a passive skill that gives "(magic) damage reduced by x." Unlike resistances, this affects the fast attackers much more than the heavy hitters. This also might make things seem a little more believable in the case of things that seem to have resistance from being big & tough. A couple arrows might not do much, but a good whack from a great axe oughta do SOMETHING. Same thing for a fire bolt vs a meteor.

3. Give more enemies skills that will slow them down, and/or make "Cannot Be Frozen" harder to obtain. Leap Attack and Charge couldn't care less about IAS. Decrepify a strafer or a zealot, and they notice big-time.



II. Making a stat harder to have:
If you want a stat to be hard to have, try to make it more of an option to have it rather than a specific item you have to find. If it's important, put it on an important item slot. Have stats 'fight' to be chosen. If you insist on making a minor item with a major stat, give it some sort of major drawback.

In vanilla D2, EVERYONE uses a ravenfrost since rings are such a minor equipment slot. However, if all you have available is Hawkmail, then you might wonder whether you want to sacrifice your armor slot for CBF.



III. Defensive skills
In vanilla D2, nobody uses defensive skills unless they either make them invincible (energy shield) or they simply just have a few extra skill points to throw around (shout). From what I've seen looking at modded games, it seems people only use them if they absolutely have to (i.e. everything 1-hit kills you). My idea is that the offensive skills shouldn't greatly outclass the defensive ones. If most of a paladin's damage came from the combat skills rather than his auras, then maybe somebody might want to try running defiance for once.



IV. One-point wonders, "everyone maxes that," and synergies
Always try to give players a reason to max something or leave it alone.

1. Static Field, Warmth, and <cold armor of choice> are all bad because their main effect is boosted enough by skill bonuses. Making huge +skills harder to get and/or giving these skills a "hard point only" effect could reduce this.

2. Smite and Battle Command are bad because their main effects are available at level one. Battle Command is pretty much unfixable unless you want to bother players with a low duration. As for smite, if it's somehow slowed down and given enough damage to actually kill something without Crushing Blow (or "Grief"), people might see it as a real PVM skill and not just a 1-point boss destroyer.

3. Battle Orders is bad because it's incorporated into EVERY single barbarian build. However, if it was less effective and there was something else interesting that overwrote its effects, there might not be a clear choice.

4. If a skill is only maxed because it's a synergy to something, that's bad too. You want people to use a skill. Putting points in it is a secondary concern. Take the sorceress for example. Once she gets fireball, how often does she ever use fire bolt? On the other hand, look at the lightning skills. Both lightning AND chain lightning stay in use. Lightning pierces and does more damage, but chain lightning is better vs spread out groups.

[Nameless]

Ad I)

Giving the monsters flat DR/MDR might help, but this will be very hard to balance, especially since the amount of damage done by individual spells/skills/items varies very much. I'm not sure if MDR handles over-time damage properly (fire patch of Meteor). If you give enough DR to make using a slow 2h weapon versus a fast 2h weapon bananced, the monsters may be almost immune to 1h weapons no matter if they're slow or fast. Also everything that increases your damage will give proportionally bigger effects like using Eth vs. Non-Eth weapons. It will also be very rewarding to rich players who can get the best items and make it very hard for somebody with substandard gear.

A big problem is that effects are simply added together and when you can get lots of effects from other sources. e.g. If Might gives 10% ED per level, Zeal has 5% and Concentrate 10%, then Zeal is obviously much better since once you add the effects together, the total damage + number of hits will be much better with the faster skill. If you reduce Might to 5%, give Zeal 10% and Concentrate 20% per level, then things look a bit different. It will also help with III, since it makes offensive auras less of a "must have" and more of an option.

It's similar with any other flat adders like elemental damage, ... they simply do more when you hit faster.
One more thing you can do is to give fast skills only a portion of the weapon damage or give slow skills an increased weapon damage, since this will also affect elemental damage (like Strafe doing only 3/4 weapon damage, you can make Conc do 3/2 weapon damage). Of course this may have other effects like making Concentrate + Fanat aura very good.

CtC skills are tricky, there isn't much you can do except tone them down.

Ad II)
Some stats you simply must have. A melee char needs CBF unless he uses a skill that isn't affected much by being chilled (Whirlwind, Wereform). I don't know if the speed penalty of cold can be reduced for the player, then it would be more of an option to get CBF. As it is, getting chilled in a bossfight is a huge problem, so CBF is a must at higher levels. Requiring some trade-off if a certain set of mods is only availiable in the same slot is ok, but you have to make sure you don't unfairly penalize some builds with it. A caster doesn't need CBF, so if he can use a powerful other mod instead, then that is an advantage.

Ad III)

In SP you have to kill monsters, simply tanking them won't do, so to make defensive skills useful, you need to make sure that using them doesn't cost the player too much damage output. e.g. give Combat skills more damage and reduce added damage of Might then a deffensive skill may be a useful choice. In MP it would be possible for a char to tank monsters while the others kill from behind, but in SP this isn't possible.

Ad IV)
If +to Skills is easy to obtain in your mod (like ES), then I think it is good to give many skills a "self-synergy" so that if you invest actual points, the skill will give a much bigger bonus than if you simply have 1pt.

Tsuru is trying very hard to make all skills useful (if not equally good) in Eastern Sun, you could look at that for some ideas on how to change skills so they aren't simply 1pt wonders, pre-reqs or synergies. e.g. Firebolt has good damage, pierces and if you invest a lot of hard points gives you more than 1 missile, so it can be a main skill if you want to use it as such.

2) Smite. Some skills allow you to give penalties. If Smite doesn't, then you could give it a (short) cast timer that decreases with invested hard points (e.g. 15 frames - 1 frame per point) so it isn't good without investing heavily, at least for boss killing with CB. To compensate and keep it useful as a main skill at low levels, increase the initial damage a lot. If you're concerned about balance, then I would remove "Grief" completely (or tone down the bonus to Smite a LOT) and increase Shield base damage, the bonus from Holy Shield and the Str factor of shields to compensate. Smite can also add elemental damage to the attack.

Battle Command. In ES it gives +2 to Skills if you invest 6 hard points and so on. This has other problems like making it almost a must-have skill for a Barb (with so many passives and Buffs every +to skills is extremely powerful).

3) Battle Orders. Life is simply very important, increasing a character's Life is one of the most effective ways to keep him alive. You could give BO a penalty, though or make it exclusive with another skill (e.g. Battle Command).

[cheractor]

In some cases slow weapons can be better than fast ones. For example, if you gain 10% of total mana per second, and you can use a skill that cost 40% mana. Then you can only use this skill once per 4 secs, doing x times weapon damage. For this skill, DPH is much more important than speed. BLZ made many such skills in the game World of Warcraft.

So, melee chars need CBF, and leech, and FHR, and many many stats, while ranged chars does not need these. Maybe we can make so that ranged chars need mana%, mana recovery, charged spells and so on?

About zeal vs conc: I think, our target is not making zeal better than conc, or conc better than zeal. Our target is make difference: in some cases we use zeal, in some other cases we use conc. To achive this target, a method is to make every skill a drawback, so they would not be useful in every situations. But it's not very easy.

[Enurta]

Problem with balancing is that if you just up the stats of the monsters then you are just hurting melee characters while ranged characters just sit back and do what they do.

[Proteus_za]

Yeah, its a tricky thing - ranged characters can stay out of harms way.

Only way to make things more difficult them is more ranged monsters, high monster movement speed, and possibly larger amounts of monsters (so they get surrounded).

I've been working on hirelings, and although I decided to standardize things like hp, dex, str etc, I decided not to change their skills. The reason is, my mod isnt a super difficult mod, so if I make hirelings more powerful, players just have less to do.

[Nimbostratus]

Nameless:
I. Yeah, it could be hard to balance, but it won't be impossible if the high-end items aren't made vastly more powerful than the regular gear. And note that making a monster immune to the weaker shots could be the intent in some places.

And yeah, the actual skills should be the primary factor in damage, not the auras. Just look at the paladin in low levels; might literally increases his damage by as much as it says, and Holy Fire adds more damage than anything at that level.

II. CBF was just a quick example. Life Leech probably would've been a better example, now that I think about it.

III. Not quite sure what you're getting at, other than repeating what I said.

IV. All these were just quick examples of each problem; I'm not asking for help balancing a few specific skills.


Proteus_za:
Increasing monster density will also hurt the melee guys, who already have to worry about getting surrounded. Making monsters move around more would also annoy the melee guys (think of the guys in Act 3 that just run away all the time).

Having monsters cast something like Slow Missiles could work, though.


=============================================


Okay, back to more ideas.

Summoners:
The regular monsters are single-target guys that aren't really effective versus huge groups like a necromancer brings with him. To make summoners actually have to worry about their minions, give monsters a way to deal with groups. However, this shouldn't be a nova or something that covers the whole screen. That (to me at least) looks like crap and also disadvantages all the other characters with an undodgeable attack. Instead, take advantage of how summons act.
-Once in range, they stay still. Meteor, fire wall, etc. work well here.
-They are in large groups. Chain lightning becomes more effective. (as does Lightning Fury, but that seems too spammish)
-They aren't players. Terror works on them. >:D

Defense being useless:
In vanilla, it doesn't help a whole lot since other things are better at keeping you alive. Slowing and life leech are a couple of the big ones. Equip a single 1-2 cold damage charm, and your melee character instantly becomes a whole lot safer. Add enough life leech, and he's safe from everything except 1-hit kills. Both of these things should be available, but not how they are in vanilla (cold damage on charms, life leech easily available on just about everything).

[cheractor]

Now that you have made summoners actually have to worry about their minions, give them ways to improve, enchant, heal, or dispell curse for their minions when they are worring.

Another problem for summoners is they can only benefit from skill level and nothing else to improve their minions. Maybe we should make some item stats for summoners? Like extra minion life, minion resist and such.

[Enurta]

BrotherLaz has made such stats in Median...they do help out immensely though

[Smiling Hobo]

Problem with balancing is that if you just up the stats of the monsters then you are just hurting melee characters while ranged characters just sit back and do what they do.

Make more ranged attackers, such as javelin panthers, skeleton archers, evil mages, etc...

*Nibbles on kitten*

[Nameless]

Problem with balancing is that if you just up the stats of the monsters then you are just hurting melee characters while ranged characters just sit back and do what they do.

Make more ranged attackers, such as javelin panthers, skeleton archers, evil mages, etc...

That just hurts melee chars even more. Killing ranged monsters is much easier if you can do it from the edge of the screen than with charging right into the middle of the pack where all of them will shoot at you.

*Kitten has been nibbled to death*

[Nimbostratus]

Ranged attacks that do higher damage at higher range could help (i.e. their missiles get stronger the farther away you are).

[Fish of Muu]

Ranged attacks that do higher damage at higher range could help (i.e. their missiles get stronger the farther away you are).

That's very hard to do, or at least hard to balance. You'd end up with ranged enemies just behind the increased damage range and sniping off melee chars.

There are other ways to reduce the effectiveness of ranged attackers other than just making more things to whack at them. Give the enemies more snares. Melee attackers really don't care about faster run/walk, but ranged attackers need to make sure they can keep the distance. Does handofathena work on players? You can also turn off light radii of monsters and then have some of the monsters reduce player light radius. How about not having ranged skills do so much damage to such a ridiculously huge area? Attacks that pretty much always hit 5 enemies should do 1/4 damage. The more enemies a skill hits, the LESS damage it should do (Blizzard (and a lot of modders) tend to think the opposite).

[Enurta]

Slow Missile definitely works on players I use to use it when I dueled back in 1.09 with my Glassazon im pretty sure it still works

[cheractor]

Attacks that pretty much always hit 5 enemies should do 1/4 damage. The more enemies a skill hits, the LESS damage it should do (Blizzard (and a lot of modders) tend to think the opposite).

Yes, but the more targets a skill tend to hits, the more total damage it should do, otherwise no one would use AOE skills.
So, in general, AOE skills total damage will increase with target numbers, but in a diminishing return.

The nature of Damage Over Time skills is similar to AOE skills. The longer the duration of a DOT skill, the more total damage it should do, but the less DPS it should dish out.


About defense. Players in D2 already had a defense line that make them nearly immortal: town portal, potions, leech. Only "instant kills" like fire enchanted BOSS explode can pierce through this defense line. Instant kill, or immortal? No, we want neither.

Monster fire power should be enough to kill a careless player character, but should not kill them if they are prepared. That's my opinion.


Edit: I’m sorry for my poor English. I've tried my best to correct this article.

[Nimbostratus]

The nature of Damage Over Time skills is similar to AOE skills. The longer the duration of a DOT skill, the more total damage it should do, but the less DPS it should dish out.

Eh, not really. There's a bunch of reasons not to go with the super-long poison skills.
1. They're boring. You poison the guy, then what? Hitting it again doesn't help until the first poison runs out.
2. They make the character seem weak. You hit something, then spend the next couple minutes running from it.
3. D2 is really based around speed. Things that take 5 minutes to kill something don't have any place in a game where people constantly work to boost their attack speed from 6 frames to 5 frames.

[Fish of Muu]

3. D2 is really based around speed. Things that take 5 minutes to kill something don't have any place in a game where people constantly work to boost their attack speed from 6 frames to 5 frames.

So remove the ability to get to 5 frame attacks. A large part of the imbalance is that everyone uses the same skills and the same items because there are only a few things that are any good. Why use Ice Bolt when Frozen Orb deals more damage to one target and hits fifty of them? Dropping your attack frames from 10 to 9 increases your potential damage by 10%, and dropping it from 5 to 4 is potentially 20%.

Back to Hellfire has some things in it that make it 'slower,' yet the game is still fun. Make a blood wizard and start running around with Blaze. It's actually pretty fun to lure enemies around.

The lower the monster density, the more useful single target skills become (mechanics wise, not damage wise. As is, AoE skills do more damage than single target skills). The less damage 'fast' attacks do, the more useful 'slow' attacks become.

[cheractor]

A large part of the imbalance is that everyone uses the same skills and the same items because there are only a few things that are any good.

IMHO, things are too good only because you already know why. But at the time before you know this, you have had many interesting choices, and didn't feel "imbalance". So now you know which is best, you choose the best one and say: the game is imbalanced because there are no choices.

We can make new choices, delete old "imbalanced" ones, and the game will be "balanced" until the new "best choice" is find out. Make choices, not balance. That's my opinion.


About poison: I think, poison damage is not a typical DOT, it can't stack. I meant hydra, firewall, thunder storm and such, they are simple to analysis.
Not stackable poison damage is to hard for me to analysis, I'd rather make every poison attacks lasts only 1 frame, avoid to getting rid of current problem about poison.

[Smiling Hobo]

So now you know which is best, you choose the best one and say: the game is imbalanced because there are no choices.

Not really. I used ice bolt for about 10 seconds, until I realized it was a piece of {filtered} skill and never touched it again, except as a synergy to frozen orb. It doesn't matter if ice bolt is "OK" or not; frozen orb (just using this as an example, FYI) outshines it in pretty much every way, soo...there really isn't much of a choice. Frozen Orb is the superior skill in every way, so ice bolt might as well not exist. That sort of thing, where a skill becomes completely obsolete, is something you should avoid.

Also, if you want to add some danger to ranged spells...enable ReturnFire...I think that will make spells like Iron Maiden, Thorns, etc. take effect even when you're dealing with a ranged missile, but I might be wrong.

*Nibbles on kitten*

[Nimbostratus]

About poison: I think, poison damage is not a typical DOT, it can't stack. I meant hydra, firewall, thunder storm and such, they are simple to analysis.
Not stackable poison damage is to hard for me to analysis, I'd rather make every poison attacks lasts only 1 frame, avoid to getting rid of current problem about poison.

Ah, okay. It's kinda hard to consider poison "not typical" as it's usually the first thing you think of when you hear "damage per second." =P Though making poison damage last only 1 frame seems kinda odd; players are expecting a 'damage over time' effect from it.

I agree with those ones except for thunderstorm; TS can't stack, and you can't even pick the target.

[cla$$ics]

Poison deals X damage in X seconds, not deals X damage each X seconds
Since poison works in this way, the lower amount of frames=the better.

Maybe I read your post wrong? because it sounded like you said the opposite...

As for slowing down attackers, I use a setup where it increases time to cast a spell AND slows down attacks (so that Zealots, Dragon Claw-ers, and Double-Swingers are not affected much, but leaves spellcasters (and zons that use spam skills, such as guided arrow, and lightning fury, especially) to get raped by the baddies), but this will NEVER be combined with slowing walk/run speed so that Barbs and Paladins still have a fighting chance.

Also, just to torture spellcasters, make all of their spells use AR, and all of them can be destroyed by enemy missiles... its what I've got rigged in Rising Moon

[Fish of Muu]

Since poison works in this way, the lower amount of frames=the better.

Wrong. Poison damage is measured per frame. The higher the amount of frames, the better.

[cheractor]

I used ice bolt for about 10 seconds, until I realized it was a piece of {filtered} skill and never touched it again, except as a synergy to frozen orb. It doesn't matter if ice bolt is "OK" or not; frozen orb (just using this as an example, FYI) outshines it in pretty much every way, soo...there really isn't much of a choice. Frozen Orb is the superior skill in every way, so ice bolt might as well not exist. That sort of thing, where a skill becomes completely obsolete, is something you should avoid.

I mean, the game was balanced for 10 seconds, and you found the best choice. A horrible design, is it?
Avoid making skills completely obsolete is a must; but even when you make different skills useful in different situations, there WILL be a best choice, 'cause you will understand its mechanic, and exclude not so good choices gradually.
Let's say “Scissors, stone and cloth” game for example, if you don't know for sure which one your foe will choose, the game provides interesting choices; but if you already know your foe is a stone, there are no choices.

What we can do, is to make the "excluding not so good choices" progress slower, not to make every choices essentially the same, (like in “Scissors, stone and cloth” game) since we have fixed foes in a single player game.


A deeper thought about poison:
In ideal situation, poison damage can apply to every monsters, like an AOE skill with cold down time. This cold down time equals the duration of poison, but you can choose to re-apply the poison before it run out, at the cost of one extra cast.
But for weapon users, it’s another story. Storywise, weapon users tend to fininsh off monsters one by one, its not worthy to scatter fire power only for poison damage part. So, remove duration of poison for weapon users might be a good choice.

[kingpin]

Balance between melee vs range can be hard. One thing to make it harder for range is to mix monster groups with both range & melee groups. There are ai's that choose between use melee skill vs range skill depend on player distance.

As example:

Make a range mob that is hard to beat on range. But have weak melee attack. Then a player want to run to melee. Now, have another mob who is strong in melee but lack range skill in same group. So, in this case a range would need to choices. Stay on range and get hurt, get into melee and get hurt

I used ice bolt for about 10 seconds, until I realized it was a piece of {filtered} skill and never touched it again, except as a synergy to frozen orb. It doesn't matter if ice bolt is "OK" or not; frozen orb (just using this as an example, FYI) outshines it in pretty much every way, soo...there really isn't much of a choice. Frozen Orb is the superior skill in every way, so ice bolt might as well not exist. That sort of thing, where a skill becomes completely obsolete, is something you should avoid.

Any skill like Frozen Orb that is superior everything else. Probably should be removed for the health of the game/mod. One push wonder skills is the hardest to balance. A skill like Frozen Orb could be ok. If he had long delay between cast. To avoid the spam fest.

[Rattlecage]

In my mod I have Two Handed weapons just as fast and more damaging than one handed weapons. The benefit of one handed weapons is that you can equip a shield. It's the whole offensive vs defensive thing basically.

[kazein]

Bumping this thread because it has some great ideas.

My 2cents about icebolt vs frozen orb issue, having them balanced should look like:
icebolt:
level: 1
cold damage: 30-60
cold length: 1
mana cost: 1
delay: 0

frozen orb (assuming it shoots out 30 missiles):
level: 1
cold damage: 1-2
cold length: 1
mana cost: 30
delay: 0