MM6 skill emphasis mod (#74)

[tnevolin]

They do if they are multipliers. Imagine character currently has +10% item and +10% skill. It'll take a lot of investment and efforts to advance skill to +20% level but it is much easier to find next level +20% item. True that if you advance both the skill and item you get 30% but finding a next-next level item for 30% increase is still easier.

Not sure we are on the same page.
Increasing 50% flat damage damage from weapon and 50% bonus damage from skill would make it +125% damage, making both equally important.
Doing this would make both skill and weapon necessary in order to deal good damage.

Nope. We are not on the same page. That's why I am trying to bring you on it.


Not both skills and weapon necessary to deal good damage. Imagine each skill jump and each weapon level jump give you 50% bonus. Imagine also it is much easier to find next level item than raise the skill. You are saying +50% is not good damage yet but +125% is good damage? Great. There are 3 (three) ways to achieve it: 1) get +2 level item, 2) get +1 level item and +1 skill, 3) get +2 skill. What path would player go, you think?

This also would prevent exploiting skill points at early stages in the game.
In a new game my knight lvl 3 has lvl 5 spear+3LVL with follower.
The spear gets 3 damage because 2hands, 2 base damage with skill and 2 damage because knight.
I have +56 damage at level 3, making the spear to hit 60-80.

I don't get how it is an *exploit* to raise your skills by investing in them and hiring followers for money.

I guess, one should just redo all chests and other item generators and corps lootings to balance item levels according to current progress stage. I'd suggest starting with https://grayface.github.io/mm/ext/ and then joining the corresponding forum. The author is still active right here on this site. I can help you with programming but I should warn you that this is extremely tedious work. Each and every item generator should be adjusted manually. I don't see other way to do it, unfortunately.

no problem, once I learn to do 1 it isn't a big deal wasting few days if it means to make a great mod, I have no other particular plans for the summer .

Sure. Let me know if you need any help.

I didn't mean you proposal is wrong. Just need more clear presentation with tables, examples, and such. Other thread participants also can contribute their opinions.

sure, is there already a table I can edit? Or I have to make it from scratch?

I managed to find the monster table. While the value are normal in actual gameplay they have 2x stats, I guess the lua code is doing the work.
I think before working on the monster balance is important to balance skills and equip first, so I would like to start there.

I didn't mean there is any formality and some global shared table around. Hell, you don't even need a table-table in the post. Just explain your idea in complete form so others can understand.

It may be just me tired and skimming over messages on this thread. Sorry, if so.

[Malekitsu]

I don't think we need to bother with bows, at lest for now. Yes, they are weak in vanilla and even weaker in SkEm and they become even more weaker with skill growth. So what? They were supposed to be lightweight weapon. I don't think even in vanilla people used bows to fight dragons or something. Too not effective.
They are very cool first third of the game and then then fade away. Don't try to revive them just for the sake of balance.

actually once speed capped they were way much stronger than anything else in the game, made this short video

that's why I love the speed cap limit you set.

Not both skills and weapon necessary to deal good damage. Imagine each skill jump and each weapon level jump give you 50% bonus. Imagine also it is much easier to find next level item than raise the skill. You are saying +50% is not good damage yet but +125% is good damage? Great. There are 3 (three) ways to achieve it: 1) get +2 level item, 2) get +1 level item and +1 skill, 3) get +2 skill. What path would player go, you think?

I don't get what you mean with item level, maybe weapon tier? BTW +2 level item=+100% damage, +2 skill=+100% damage, +1 level item and +1 skill= +125% damage.
With hard enough enemies player will be likely to try to maximise both.
My goal is to make getting good items by going in dungeons and not shops, so in an actually gameplay you go in the dungeon, get the experience to level up and skill up and open a chest with new stronger weapon, so you do both at the same time.
Making it in numbers, the formula would be:

damage= (weapon damage+strenght)*(weaponSkill*1.05)*(heroism bonus)

So for example:
weapon damage: 20-30
strenght: 75 (resulting in +10 damage)
Weapon skill= 20
Heroism= off

it would be (20-30+10)*(20*1.05)*(1) = 60-80 damage

The 1.05 value depends on the class and the weapon.
As for heroism I would plan making it do around a flat 5-10-15% increase with N-E-M.

The magic defense would be:
total defenses=(staffSkill+magicBuff+armorSkill+luckBonus)*(Equip resistance)

The first part is just as now are calculated resistance in your mod.
The second part would be different.
For example a ring instead of granting+10 at all resistances would instead grant+10% resistances, making it super cool.
In the current mod leather makes mages to achieve almost magic immunity, not sure if intended. I can try edit the lua if you want for some tentative adjustments.

I don't get how it is an *exploit* to raise your skills by investing in them and hiring followers for money.

It's simply overtuned, almost oneshotting goblin lords after 5 minutes in the game is weird.

[tnevolin]

RE: bows

As I said before, I don't care much about bows. They just don't become and ultimate weapon and other than than I'll accept any experimentation.

I don't get what you mean with item level, maybe weapon tier? BTW +2 level item=+100% damage, +2 skill=+100% damage, +1 level item and +1 skill= +125% damage.
With hard enough enemies player will be likely to try to maximise both.
My goal is to make getting good items by going in dungeons and not shops, so in an actually gameplay you go in the dungeon, get the experience to level up and skill up and open a chest with new stronger weapon, so you do both at the same time.
Making it in numbers, the formula would be:

damage= (weapon damage+strenght)*(weaponSkill*1.05)*(heroism bonus)

So for example:
weapon damage: 20-30
strenght: 75 (resulting in +10 damage)
Weapon skill= 20
Heroism= off

it would be (20-30+10)*(20*1.05)*(1) = 60-80 damage

The 1.05 value depends on the class and the weapon.
As for heroism I would plan making it do around a flat 5-10-15% increase with N-E-M.

Yes, I understand the idea and formula.

What is "maximization" in your terms? What do you maximize? Do you imply there is maximum damage achieved player cannot improve any more? That would be kind of counter RPG style which assumes infinite growth. Of course, there are technical limitation like mm6 skill cannot go beyond 63 but, at least, designers are trying to make sure 99.99% of players never reach it.

The magic defense would be:
total defenses=(staffSkill+magicBuff+armorSkill+luckBonus)*(Equip resistance)

The first part is just as now are calculated resistance in your mod.
The second part would be different.
For example a ring instead of granting+10 at all resistances would instead grant+10% resistances, making it super cool.
In the current mod leather makes mages to achieve almost magic immunity, not sure if intended. I can try edit the lua if you want for some tentative adjustments.

Yeah, sure. Let's try it.

I don't get how it is an *exploit* to raise your skills by investing in them and hiring followers for money.

It's simply overtuned, almost oneshotting goblin lords after 5 minutes in the game is weird.

Yep. Something fixable by skill progression formula or some counter parameters: monster toughness, etc. Nothing inherently flawed.

[Malekitsu]

What is "maximization" in your terms? What do you maximize? Do you imply there is maximum damage achieved player cannot improve any more? That would be kind of counter RPG style which assumes infinite growth. Of course, there are technical limitation like mm6 skill cannot go beyond 63 but, at least, designers are trying to make sure 99.99% of players never reach it.

By maximizing searching best best weapon available at that moment in the game and put as much skill points as possible, kinda of optimizing the resources you have.

Yep. Something fixable by skill progression formula or some counter parameters: monster toughness, etc. Nothing inherently flawed.

with the formula I wrote above should fix without having the game to be balanced around it, what do you think? Another option would be nerfing the 2h bonus damage and the knight bonus damage.

[tnevolin]

By maximizing searching best best weapon available at that moment in the game and put as much skill points as possible, kinda of optimizing the resources you have.

Got it.

Yep. Something fixable by skill progression formula or some counter parameters: monster toughness, etc. Nothing inherently flawed.

with the formula I wrote above should fix without having the game to be balanced around it, what do you think? Another option would be nerfing the 2h bonus damage and the knight bonus damage.

Sure. Let's do it.

[RawSugar]

Weapons: I like the idea but just want to point out that the actual game experience will change very little for such a huge rework, assuming the formula is done well so it doesnt boost damage vs current skilldependent damage. most of the time damage should be more or less the same, although it'll be somewhat lower at early game. Its a lot of hoops for a treasurehunt that hopefully wont change combat overly.

Bow: an archer ends up at around 130 damage using a +10 elemental damage bow, more using a fireball bow i think? Thats pretty good for 0 mana and physical, not weak at all. knights i think can achieve something like half that, which is quite decent as well. Ranged should be weaker than melee.
I think the game has found a decent balance, but i'd like to see how it looks if fx expert gave + damage either instead of or as well as recovery.

resistance: resist all is already a fairly useful item, especially for characters that dont get +resist from other sources due to diminishing returns, but making it a boost of existing resistance is actually fairly balanced. it can even give both the + resist and the boost (was way off on the math earlier, was looking at average rather than marginal return.)

[RawSugar]

monsterdamage: the formula of damage*(1vl/20+1.25) should be perfect.

There's a few outliers though in the vanilla game and therefore also if the changes are the same for all. These are mostly in the early game and its units like queen cobra, veteran, captain, master swordmaster all of which have a secondary attack. It felt like in the mod they were applying both damages with every attack, looking at the table it looks like its more supposed to be an occasional damage boost, replacing the main attack?

Regardless applying the formula only to main attack and spell rank (but not secondary attack) should smoothen the curve. Hopefully thats possible?

Spells: Since you so promptly did the bugfixes with shrap metal and such i was hoping updating spells might be possible as well:)
I started a new game and early game sparks damage is really too high A few of the other spell changes would also greatly improve the game

[raekuul]

I can work on disentangling the core of Skill Emphasis from the difficulty/balance aspect of things (there's some really neat things going on in the balance work but it'll start veering off into New Experience in order to explore it properly), I just need a quick rundown of what's core SkEm, what's monster rebalancing in reaction to core SkEm, and what's re-rebalancing SkEm in response to the monster rebalancing.

SkEm would be an excellent base for MM6 Randomizer and I would love to do the both together but Full SkEm punishes you for going in to areas when you're unprepared for them and Randomizer changes the order of progression entirely so as things currently stand it's a very bad idea to mix the two - in my randomizer game the Goblinwatch Key was in Tsantsa.

EDIT: Okay this is unfair but also kind of hilarious? I'm trying to clear my way through to Free Haven and I'm fighting the big cluster of followers and lizards that's just west of Castle Ironfist town and the increased movement speed means that the monsters can disengage whenever the hell they want and I can't actually catch up to them (homing arrows helps with this but only once I've thinned the herd and every time I catch up to the fleeing Follower it runs out of my range faster than I can get there)

Movement speed definitely needs to be based on the creature's AI though - I spent a few minutes chasing around a lizard man who won't stand still long enough for me to attack him and his movement rules are putting him in ravines that block the auto-aim on the projectiles.

[Malekitsu]

Weapons: I like the idea but just want to point out that the actual game experience will change very little for such a huge rework, assuming the formula is done well so it doesnt boost damage vs current skilldependent damage. most of the time damage should be more or less the same, although it'll be somewhat lower at early game. Its a lot of hoops for a treasurehunt that hopefully wont change combat overly.

The idea is:
1) balancing early game
2) making weapons and might important
3) in a near future with some work I would like to change the loot table making strong weapon drop in hard dungeons.

Bow: an archer ends up at around 130 damage using a +10 elemental damage bow, more using a fireball bow i think? Thats pretty good for 0 mana and physical, not weak at all.

I guess this is with weapon skill at 60 with +1 damage bonus, in that case melee weapon are going to hit for more than 500 anyway with the current formula, so I think it's fairly balanced or even still weak.

resistance: resist all is already a fairly useful item, especially for characters that dont get +resist from other sources due to diminishing returns, but making it a boost of existing resistance is actually fairly balanced. it can even give both the + resist and the boost (was way off on the math earlier, was looking at average rather than marginal return.)

Glad you looked into this, by having some baseline defense with staff, armor, buff and luck they should be strong but not mandatory during all the phases of the game.
I'm working on a table to balance things out.
The current things I would like to fix are:
1) too much resistance from leather and mail
2) luck feeling irrelevant in later stage of the game
3) buffs too strong at higher level

Any advice is welcome.

Note: having super high resistance and adjusting enemies spells around that would make unlucky dice roll doing spiky damage, while a lower resistance would make a more solid and less spiky damage.

[RawSugar]

weapons: its hopefully straightforward; halve the bonus damage pr skill and convert the other half into %. then compare that to the current damage assuming the wearer is using a max tier weapon (and a low tier one to make sure low level damage is reasonable. I think SkEm has done a great job at balancing melee with spells, best not to mess with that.

Bow : no its 15 damage for bow+10 elemental *2 arrows at 30 recovery for ~165 damage (a good deal of which is elemental) . If im understandig the system (im not sure i am^^) knights achieve this at around rank 30-40, archers somewhat sooner. Given these are 0 mana attacks its very good, en par with firebolt which is a 4 mana spell. knights arent likely to rank that high but rank 20 for ~100 damage is not a bad investment
I think maybe archers could get a bonus to damage rather than recovery though, their bonus makes them reach cap early (16-20) rather than encourage becoming master bowmen.

Resistance: there is something to be said for less bonuses, but i dont know, its already not at the point where you'd usually consider doing 50/50 offense/defense. It's also probably a good thing that damage is somewhat unpredictable. there's a lot of stuff that makes bursts of damage rare at high level i think its fine for it to be an option - although its one of the things keeping me from raising damage further.
what buffs are too strong at higher level?

[Malekitsu]

weapons: its hopefully straightforward; halve the bonus damage pr skill and convert the other half into %.

it would still make the weapon fairly weak compared to the skill, but better than before

I think SkEm has done a great job at balancing melee with spells, best not to mess with that.

Probably true at higher level, but early/mid game weapon are overtuned and spells weak in comparison.

what buffs are too strong at higher level?

elemental resistance buffs.

Side note to tnevolin:
I noticed that you modified the spell resistance effect of basic elemental resistance to +3-4-5.
Day of protection still grants +2-3-4, making it weaker, is that intended?

Also I've calculated that end game player will be at around lvl 100, but with the new "learning" skill I'm not sure how the formula is calculated. It's written that above 12 is a waste of points, does it means that the max achievable bonus exp is (12*5%)+9%= 69%?
*9% is the basic bonus when you acquire the skill

[RawSugar]

Weapon; it makes roughly half the damage come from skill, that way the knight is still decent with a mediocre weapon. it can be all % though, same procedure either way.

Spell vs weapon; not reallly my experience, sure knights are strong but they need melee to deal damage, if anything casters are overtuned early because of the massive boost the short range spells have been given to base damage, but the buffs to fire AOE spells are also significant. My experience is that its really well balanced as is - except sparks etc are kinda OP

Buffs: compared to day of protection they are underpowered, they are at the level where there's a good return on investment. they can be halved without making them useless but i like that you get a good return on investment for defensive skills.

[raekuul]

Side note to tnevolin:
I noticed that you modified the spell resistance effect of basic elemental resistance to +3-4-5.
Day of protection still grants +2-3-4, making it weaker, is that intended?

Barring a convenience tax (because I would not put it past myself to make the reported change on purpose), Day of Protection is supposed to cast those all at once at 2x/3x/4x their regular effect (so Light Dark E.4 should provide fire resistance as though they were Fire E.12). Can you confirm what numbers you're seeing in-game after casting, both the separate spells and Day of Protection?

[RawSugar]

far as I recall DoP cast at x4 level for duration not effect. I gave up on playing melee in vanilla when i learned that, because its same for HoP.

[Malekitsu]

far as I recall DoP cast at x4 level for duration not effect.

In vanilla DoP with Master gives 4 resistance point for each point in Dark Skill.

Can you confirm what numbers you're seeing in-game after casting, both the separate spells and Day of Protection?

tested with save editor in both vanilla and SkEm:
60 Dark master = 240 resistances in both versions
60 Fire master = 300 fire resistace in SkEm, 180 in Vanilla.

To Make an example:
lvl 8 expert dark is: 8x3=24 bonus magic defense
lvl 4 normal dark is 4x2=8 bonus magic defense

It makes sense because leveling up fire,air,water and earth is way much more expensive than just going full dark.
It also helps early game, making resistance buff meaningful even at lower level.
It's a really good change.

[raekuul]

Conceptually it would be simpler to rewire DoP/DoG/HoP to actually simultaneously cast the spells at the amplified rate, instead of shortcutting to the results step like it currently does (it would be a bit of a time investment getting it to work but once you do you have one less spell to update during any further adjusting); the main issue would be the computational cost of actually firing all the spells at once. I'll have to look into doing that when I'm working on the Disentangling.

With that said, I'm on board for keeping the current behavior, since that is a suitable convenience tax. It's exceptionally rare that you'll need more than two resistance types at once (and one of the few times you do want more than two at once, you're getting Dispel Magic thrown at you most of the time!)

[Malekitsu]

That's a first idea of how it could be.
As soon as I'm back home I'll make a function to calculate how much damage is reduced on average for all the parameters, to see if there is need for adjustments and if enemies needs a different scaling.
I've seen the formula on grayface website, is the dice roll infinite until loose or there is a limit at a certain point (like at 1/16)?
As always any advice is welcome!

[tnevolin]

monsterdamage: the formula of damage*(1vl/20+1.25) should be perfect.

Regardless applying the formula only to main attack and spell rank (but not secondary attack) should smoothen the curve. Hopefully thats possible?

That gives 100 level monster 6.25 multiplier. Are you sure people will be able to beat these end game monsters?

Absolutely possible as I already pointed out. I'll just replace existing formula with new one. Are we talking about damage only modification here? Monster HP stays at x2?

Spells: Since you so promptly did the bugfixes with shrap metal and such i was hoping updating spells might be possible as well:)
I started a new game and early game sparks damage is really too high A few of the other spell changes would also greatly improve the game

When I remember where it is and it is one liner - sure.

Here is the list of all offensive spells modifications.
https://github.com/tnevolin/mm6-skill-e ... d.lua#L355
Feel free to propose your modifications. Also I have shared my spreadsheet with spell damage (vanilla vs. mod). Feel free to play with it as well.

Actually, you can find this file on your machine and change values right there and try them out and then merge them in when you are satisfied.

[raekuul]

monsterdamage: the formula of damage*(1vl/20+1.25) should be perfect.

Regardless applying the formula only to main attack and spell rank (but not secondary attack) should smoothen the curve. Hopefully thats possible?

That gives 100 level monster 6.25 multiplier. Are you sure people will be able to beat these end game monsters?

Unless you moved where the Blaster Skill is obtained, you can do some tricky maneuvering to fight the bots one at a time in Control Center, so it's only the stronger class of Kreegan that would be an issue (due to sheer numbers), and the more devastating Meteor Swarm (1) isn't homed and (2) can't be cast indoors anyway. It'll need some fine-tuning though; 6.25x on a Devil Lord is going to hurt bad once combined with the amplified move speed.

Incidentally, hostile Meteor Swarm spells are why we don't usually engage the exterior Kreegan in turn-based mode. If you can't move you eat all twelve shots. Even in vanilla, that's usually enough to force the party to disengage.

Even with SkEm you're not ever required to fight Titans/Hydras/Gold Dragons (you can take the Queen Cathrine to the Hermit's Isle Temple of Baa once you've exposed the traitor, and Dragons prefer to stay at range so you should be able to get from the Blackshire<>Dragonsand Crossing to the Tomb of VARN without getting absolutely massacred)

[tnevolin]

I can work on disentangling the core of Skill Emphasis from the difficulty/balance aspect of things (there's some really neat things going on in the balance work but it'll start veering off into New Experience in order to explore it properly), I just need a quick rundown of what's core SkEm, what's monster rebalancing in reaction to core SkEm, and what's re-rebalancing SkEm in response to the monster rebalancing.

Here is the file.
https://github.com/tnevolin/mm6-skill-e ... ll-mod.lua
Find it on your machine, edit it, test in the game. Then you can merge whatever you like back to main project or spin off yours.

I would absolutely love using it in experience mod. The only thing is that it can be used in multiple experience mods since it is just engine modification. I want to keep engine code available for everybody who wants to spin off an experience mod off it. I guess the best way to go would be to fork repository off SkEm and then update it periodically when SkEm introduces new features.

For balance aspect of things please read readme introduction (or the whole stuff). The main ideas are to 1) emphasize skill importance to make it a more of RPG, and 2) to highlight any underused features to make game more variative and replayable.

Example. Vanilla does not require use of potions, buffs, followers, and low level spells to clear most of NS and its dungeons on continent. I tried to modify game parameters (including monster strength) so that now it would be extremely difficult to beat them without above improvement. Player has to use them to stay on par with monsters. Underused layers of the game now become an integral part of it.

SkEm would be an excellent base for MM6 Randomizer and I would love to do the both together but Full SkEm punishes you for going in to areas when you're unprepared for them and Randomizer changes the order of progression entirely so as things currently stand it's a very bad idea to mix the two - in my randomizer game the Goblinwatch Key was in Tsantsa.

Do you randomize map/locations? Can you share a link to it?

EDIT: Okay this is unfair but also kind of hilarious? I'm trying to clear my way through to Free Haven and I'm fighting the big cluster of followers and lizards that's just west of Castle Ironfist town and the increased movement speed means that the monsters can disengage whenever the hell they want and I can't actually catch up to them (homing arrows helps with this but only once I've thinned the herd and every time I catch up to the fleeing Follower it runs out of my range faster than I can get there)

If you return to the map they'll be at their normal spawn location.
But you are right, that adds some new element to the game especially if they are still shooting.