MM6 skill emphasis mod (#74)

[Anubis]

Will one be able to update to the latest version of your mod during a playthrough or would you have to start a brand new playthrough to apply the Shrine of Electricity fix (Along with any other changes you may have done)

[tnevolin]

First of all, upgrading mod version requires relaunching game application. Just to be sure.

As for whether altar fix is compatible with save game - tough to say. The altar is initialized when entering the map. I suppose if player leaves the map with altar and enters it again the function should reinitialize and work properly. The same should happen on game load. That is as far as I understand how MMExtension works but cannot guarantee.

[tnevolin]

Updated balance branch.

Healing cost now is proportional to restored HP/SP and party experience level. Ailment healing is proportional to party experience level.

[Anubis]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... height=429

Asking for someone: Is the recovery value correct? 10/10/10?

[tnevolin]

It's not a recovery value but recovery penalty. Meaning wearing shield makes character recovery worse by 10.

[Anubis]

The user pointed out that the recovery penalty changes. According to the user: When they upgraded shield to expert, the recovery penalty was reduced. When they upgraded shield to master, the recovery penalty was gone entirely.

Because of that, he was wondering why the recovery penalty values showed as 10/10/10 for normal/expert/master

[tnevolin]

Hmm. You may be right. Let me check it out.

Here is the deal.
These values are from vanilla. I didn't change them. If one look into vanilla table they will see 10/10/10 penalty for shield. It is also not mentioned in the vanilla shield description that rank decreases this penalty. In fact shield recovery penalty is not mentioned in shield description at all. However, game internally actually sets shield recovery penalty and then reduces it with rank. So it is a bug in vanilla shield description that becomes visible in this mod as it visualizes and display it.

I can either remove this "recovery penalty" column from all shield/armor descriptions at all to not confuse players.
Other option would be to correct these values to match actual mechanics.

[Anubis]

Other option would be to correct these values to match actual mechanics.

You mean correcting the numbers from 10 / 10 / 10 to 10 / 5 / 0 for example? I think that might be the better solution.

[tnevolin]

#73
Fixed shield displayed recovery penalties.

[tnevolin]

#74
https://github.com/tnevolin/mm6-skill-e ... version-74

Monster spell damage now calculates properly.
In vanilla it was calculated absolutely weird way. Lazy programming?

[tnevolin]

Asked question about Raise Dead weird behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MightAndMagic/ ... _behavior/

[tnevolin]

Guardian Angel spell is a little too narrow focused and actually current implementation causes some HP problem. I am thinking to redo it like that.

• Duration is proportional to skill.
• Protects against death because of HP going to low due to monster attack.
• Protects against all other bad effects induced by monsters.
• Every time character is protected by this spell its duration reduced by equivalent of 1 skill level. I.e. with 10 skill can theoretically absorb 10 bad effects. Practically, only 9 as it is also gets expired by itself.
• Optionally, bad effects list to protect against can be expanded with mastery.
• Novice: death from HP loss, Asleep, Afraid, Drunk.
• Expert: Weak, Cursed, Poison123, Disease123, Insane.
• Master: Paralyzed, Dead, Stoned, (Eradicated?).

[raekuul]

I would move Weak from Expert to Novice, since all the other Novice protected effects are cured by resting... though Weak has a secondary penalty in that it blocks being Hasted so

[tnevolin]

I don't mind. This is just a wish list. I was thinking to place any effects not directly affecting combat to the first layer. Then directly affecting combat in second layer, and complete immobilization in third.
Weak halves physical damage. In this regards it is similar to Curse for weapon attack.

[Ark_Tolei]

Lovely, my entire message was deleted when I tried to preview it due to autologout.

Just finished this mod on version 65, updated to version 76 when I finished to do some math.

The mod successfully does what it suggests on the tin. Knights/paladins are much better at melee relative to spellcasters in the mod compared to vanilla. The overall difficulty of the mod is roughly similar by endgame, but some parts of the game are noticeably easier or harder. Darkmoor is relatively easy compared to vanilla, because buffs make up a smaller percentage of your combat effectiveness (both resists and dps) most other sections are at least a bit harder due to the homing attacks and enemy movement speed. Some areas are more RNG dependent (can't dodge the instant death proc from titans, but you have massively higher magic resist)

Armor skills are more meaningful, but they aren't terribly well balanced in the lategame. Plate is, for most of the game, the weakest armor, and is the most susceptible to having the worst effects trigger (i.e. death/eradication). The cover effect may seem helpful against a minotaur king, but that 0 base MR instead of the 80 your wizard had means if it hits, and it still most likely will, you're very likely go be gibbed by the proc.

I had a whole long thing about it in the previous version, but the short version will suffice. An easy fix is to copy/paste the leather resist value onto chain/plate. Almost every lategame threat ignores AC, but doesn't ignore resists (particularly magic resist, which is almost impossible to get). If you want a more interesting but harder to implement fix that makes leather/chain/plate feel different from each other, you can give 1 flat damage reduction per point after resistance checks to plate, and if you're feeling generous give chain half that. This gives plate users a reason to invest past 4, and makes each point of resistance they get from other sources more valuable.

Weapons are a bit of a mess, mostly because problems that are hidden by the vanilla recovery mechanics, are shown fully by the changes made to the recovery system. The changes you've made are good, but you can't make those changes and then leave some weapons at 0 recovery per skill point. They won't be carried by picking up a swiftness weapon and haste in the lategame, those effects are very weak now.

I suggest that you set every weapon skill to increase recovery by 2 at mastery (0/1/2 makes sense to me) except offhand skills, which you will balance entirely separately. Staves are not really weapons, you can ignore balancing their offensive potential and focus instead on making the secondary effects you added interesting. Axe/Spear/Mace need to all feel useful. Mace has a powerful effect already, so you're left with 2 options for axe/spear. Make those weapons deal massively more damage (at least 20% stronger than the full dps expectation of a mace user in their place) or give them interesting effects to compensate. Making them deal more damage is honestly very hard to balance, and I would recommend going with the proc angle instead. The code for this (unlike the plate effect described earlier) is mostly written in MM7's base code somewhere.

If you give axes a 10+(3xskill) chance to proc an effect that 0's out enemy AC (akin to the MM7 GM effect, but 0 instead of .5) that is actually very solid in your mod for lategame enemies. Knights only have an 80ish% chance to hit a gold dragon's 200 AC with skill values in the 30's. Having a guaranteed proc on that initial hit that ensures ensuing attacks succeed would increase dps substantially. It also increases the odds that other party members with maces/spears hit their target and get the chance to apply their proc.

You can then give spears a similar chance to proc an effect that 0's out enemy resistances. Same deal, just resists instead. This effect benefits spellcasters more when applied, and is potentially much stronger overall, so maybe give it a lower proc chance, maybe give it the same, so long as it's much higher than the mace proc. It's fine if this proc is explicitly stronger than the other proc so long as it is preferable to bring both.

This gives you a choice in weapon usage, with axes/spears both giving massive boosts to party dps (that you preferably stack with 2 melees), and maces having extremely powerful single target CC usable by anyone but wizards.

Once you've chosen how you want to balance the main hands, adjust the offhand recovery bonus to whatever gets your lategame recovery value to where you want it to be by around skill level 30 or so. If that's 30, set it lower, if it's 20 set it higher. Alternatively you can just adjust to be whatever is necessary to make you get to exactly 10 if you stack every possible effect at its maximum value (60/60 main/offhand, full buffs, recovery/swiftness gear, etc.) making the hardcap equal to the softcap. It depends entirely on design philosophy. There are other ways to do it as well, the important thing is having a specific target in mind.

2 handed weapons are a nightmare to try to balance. If you can, I would maybe modify the 2h bonus from 3 to 3/6/9 and just accept that it will have some weird outlying effects depending on playstyle. Another option that might be interesting would be to leave it at 3 (or even lower it to 2) but base it off character level instead, which would make 2hers a powerful choice for people who aren't investing heavily into weapon skills. As it stands the recovery nerf that you did for axes means 2h axe usage is functionally dead later in the game. A fully buffed knight with 38 axe skill has a recovery time of 41 vs. recovery in the 20's with dual wield. The options to deal with it are to make 2handers do massively more burst damage (for lancing in and out of melee range) or make 2handers not directly compete (i.e. being good at lower skill investment, particularly useful for spell focused paladins or skill focused knights in the early game)

[Ark_Tolei]

Now for bugs/possible bugs I noticed. Most of these apply specifically to version 65, some of the inventory stuff was tested with both 65 and 76

1: Conan doesn't have its stats adjusted like other 2h axes do, check that the artifacts are modified to your liking.
2: Of darkness effects are using the old calculation, that is to say, it only works on the slower of the two weapons you have. Given the direction you've gone with recovery, I think it makes the most sense for it to work on either weapon. I haven't checked swiftness, but I think it uses the same calculation internally so I assume that the issue applies to both.
3: Some enemy projectiles do not home at all, and other enemy projectiles are inconsistent. I believe archers consistently do not home, and titans are inconsistent, with roughly 1 in 5 shots not homing. There are other enemies this applies to as well, and it does seem to be tied to enemy type. For titans it holds true for both their standard attack and spell attack as of 65
4: Town portal seems to be pointing to the wrong locations. I don't think I have any other mods installed that could be the culprit.

[Pol]

Lovely, my entire message was deleted when I tried to preview it due to autologout.

Timeout is two hours. In old times we had a warning placed in preview, navigating you to log in again in different window. I guess that it went gone?

[raekuul]

wall o' text

We're working on a bunch of balance branches and trying to finalize the tech. There's actually been a bunch of versions minor that haven't been pushed to tnevolin's github (mostly because we're all still arguing over what should be where).

Please note that some of the below information is sourced from Beta 0.8.4 which is not "live" yet.

Weapons in general are being balanced against a Shrapmetal spell of equivalent rank/mastery. Weapons have the principle advantage of costing zero SP and we do need to be cognizant of that fact - one of our experimental (and probably not-getting-into-Core) changes was to give The Hive a respawn time of 0, which favored weapon-based parties too heavily due to the SP costs involved.

Axes and Spears (and to a lesser extent, Maces) get more additional damage per rank compared to other weapons; Axes also get recovery per rank starting from Expert. Just because all they do is damage doesn't mean that they're not getting improved.
Staves get the 2H Weapon bonus and also get the Knight damage bonus per rank; it's not the best offensive option but like you said you don't use Staves because they're weapons. (The Shrink/Feeblemind chance is nice, but the real prize is bringing staves to rank 10 to get their Mastery perk of "everybody gets resistances")

One of the challenges we've run into is that the 'core' Mace paralysis is too strong - once you isolate a monster into melee, it's basically dead. The challenge comes from managing to isolate monsters when faced with a crowd (like the Big Room of Devils and High Kreegan at the start of The Hive).

We don't want to just have all the armors give the "same" resistance values, for a number of reasons. One of them is that Plate and Chain armors have those per-rank percentage damage reductions in addition to their AC boosts; I would suggest getting in the habit of keeping an extra set of chain armor on hand for your Plate wearer (I had the same issue with Plate armor you do but from the opposite direction: the default Paladin in the Quick Start setup doesn't have enough HP to wear Plate armor 100% of the time, and there are a bunch of mid-game melee-heavy dungeons where the monsters are biased towards attacking Paladins anyway so a Plated Paladin is getting KO'd before he can do any paladinning).

On the topic of bugs:
1. Artifacts in general are unchanged (the lua that changes item parameters looks at the skill type and dice/sides/bonus to determine what type of weapon we're looking at, so I'm completely unsurprised that Conan got left out);
2. I'll pass this on to the others; I focus on 2H weapons for my melee attackers (I'm weird and use my archers as my primary melee) and generally don't use dual weapons, so the exact issues here are a bit out of the scope of my knowledge
3. There's known issues with the Homing Projectiles code and it's under revision.
4. We don't actually touch the Town Portal destinations (so far the only change to teleporters is repointing New Sorpigal's dev door to Abdul's Discount Oasis Resort instead of to the Shrine of the Gods). Double-check your data/Tables/Town Portal.txt file.

[cthscr]

4: Town portal seems to be pointing to the wrong locations. I don't think I have any other mods installed that could be the culprit.

Regenerating Data/Tables and DataFiles worked for me (when I've switched MMExtension from 2.2 to repo).

[tnevolin]

First of all, thank you Ark for very detailed feedback. Much appreciated.

Feel free to join Slack group where a lot of this mod balancing question are discussed. May be interesting for you.

You are generally right that any mechanics change requires further rebalancing. From the other hand, the rebalancing effort never ends. We need to polish it more and more. I will appreciate any involvement in this.

Armor skills are more meaningful, but they aren't terribly well balanced in the lategame. Plate is, for most of the game, the weakest armor, and is the most susceptible to having the worst effects trigger (i.e. death/eradication). The cover effect may seem helpful against a minotaur king, but that 0 base MR instead of the 80 your wizard had means if it hits, and it still most likely will, you're very likely go be gibbed by the proc.

I was thinking to limit cover effect by physical attacks only. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to cover as plate gives no magic protection.

Another modification I have in mind to reduce chain/leather magic protection. It was there only to differentiate armor from each other and if becomes too overpowered this need to be reduced to the level where it is still interesting but not overwhelming.

you can give 1 flat damage reduction per point after resistance checks to plate, and if you're feeling generous give chain half that. This gives plate users a reason to invest past 4, and makes each point of resistance they get from other sources more valuable.

That is one of the feature they are working on a Slack group. Useful feature. However, if it reduces non-physical damage as well this is an equivalent of resistance. In which case it becomes heavily redundant with AC/resistance.

Weapons are a bit of a mess, mostly because problems that are hidden by the vanilla recovery mechanics, are shown fully by the changes made to the recovery system. The changes you've made are good, but you can't make those changes and then leave some weapons at 0 recovery per skill point. They won't be carried by picking up a swiftness weapon and haste in the lategame, those effects are very weak now.

I wouldn't say it is a complete mess. Some considerable time was invested to balance but they still may be improved. Initial weapon recovery can be adjusted. However, I didn't find it too critical as it dissolves in other factors with skill progression. Feel free to propose better values. If anything, vanilla values are same exactly mess if not worse.

Swiftness and haste have diminished effect as any other effect and it should be like that. It is still possible to achiever pretty high speed.

I suggest that you set every weapon skill to increase recovery by 2 at mastery (0/1/2 makes sense to me) except offhand skills, which you will balance entirely separately. Staves are not really weapons, you can ignore balancing their offensive potential and focus instead on making the secondary effects you added interesting. Axe/Spear/Mace need to all feel useful. Mace has a powerful effect already, so you're left with 2 options for axe/spear. Make those weapons deal massively more damage (at least 20% stronger than the full dps expectation of a mace user in their place) or give them interesting effects to compensate. Making them deal more damage is honestly very hard to balance, and I would recommend going with the proc angle instead. The code for this (unlike the plate effect described earlier) is mostly written in MM7's base code somewhere.

If you give axes a 10+(3xskill) chance to proc an effect that 0's out enemy AC (akin to the MM7 GM effect, but 0 instead of .5) that is actually very solid in your mod for lategame enemies. Knights only have an 80ish% chance to hit a gold dragon's 200 AC with skill values in the 30's. Having a guaranteed proc on that initial hit that ensures ensuing attacks succeed would increase dps substantially. It also increases the odds that other party members with maces/spears hit their target and get the chance to apply their proc.

You can then give spears a similar chance to proc an effect that 0's out enemy resistances. Same deal, just resists instead. This effect benefits spellcasters more when applied, and is potentially much stronger overall, so maybe give it a lower proc chance, maybe give it the same, so long as it's much higher than the mace proc. It's fine if this proc is explicitly stronger than the other proc so long as it is preferable to bring both.

This gives you a choice in weapon usage, with axes/spears both giving massive boosts to party dps (that you preferably stack with 2 melees), and maces having extremely powerful single target CC usable by anyone but wizards.

Very interesting suggestion. By AC proc you mean axe will eliminate monster AC to the end of their life? If so, one does not need to use axe for that after first hit - damage is done.

I was thinking to redo how AC/resistance work making it more of a smooth threshold way. Meaning too high AC (comparing to attack) is very hardly penetrable. Whereas too low AC gives little protection. Then giving some weapon armor piercing effect reducing opponent AC will be very useful feature but *only* against heavy armored opponents. Which makes it an interesting tactical game.

This way if one weapon (axe, spear) has this special effect we don't need to specialize another one. One of them will be just raw damage while another does better against heavily armored opponents.

I didn't plan to extend it to resistances but we can think of something similar.

2 handed weapons are a nightmare to try to balance. If you can, I would maybe modify the 2h bonus from 3 to 3/6/9 and just accept that it will have some weird outlying effects depending on playstyle. Another option that might be interesting would be to leave it at 3 (or even lower it to 2) but base it off character level instead, which would make 2hers a powerful choice for people who aren't investing heavily into weapon skills. As it stands the recovery nerf that you did for axes means 2h axe usage is functionally dead later in the game. A fully buffed knight with 38 axe skill has a recovery time of 41 vs. recovery in the 20's with dual wield. The options to deal with it are to make 2handers do massively more burst damage (for lancing in and out of melee range) or make 2handers not directly compete (i.e. being good at lower skill investment, particularly useful for spell focused paladins or skill focused knights in the early game)

True. Although I should mention they weren't balances in vanilla at all. You don't need to blame this mod to make it *less* balanced.


Here they are at least usable at some point and somehow to some extent. Any more ideas are welcome.