Weapon balancing?

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Eidolon
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Weapon balancing?

Post by Eidolon »

not sure what everyone thinks abt this. or if anyone thinks any weapons are unbalanced.

i just thought someone might agree with me that staffs need a little reworking.
i know people bitch abt ebony staffs being too powerful. or are all the other tints (including leeching) too useless?

comments?
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Keighn
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Post by Keighn »

On leeching:

I've made (with the old enchanting via friends enchanting for me) several Leeching weapons (slings, bows, swords, polearms, etc) PVM they work pretty good for restoring your mana like a vampyric weapon. PVP, they don't have a large effect on your target. I've been consistantly blasted away.

Leeching on staves; I have no idea if it works or not but I do know that vampyric works pretty well depending on the spell you use (IVPY mainly)

I haven't really tested addled weapons too much. I have no idea if addled staves do anything.

Barbed does work with weapons. I hear though that if you wound a mage that they may still cast if struck from barbed (damn!). Combine with an axe weapon and you've got a nice combo.

Barbed staves; I have no idea.

Runed weapons work well. Runes staves are a mystery to me.

Venemonous weapons are great. Venemous staves work and I should use them more in pvp.

Naturally, Diamond, Blackrock, Adamantine staves work as expected to either inflict more damage, cut MR, or both depending on the tint.

I'm kind of sad now that I didn't think to make a tint of each staff leeching to test the theory fully. I suppose egg could test this.

My only real complaint about leeching was the limitation to +3. The standard range of +0 to +10 would have been much more useful.

This would IMHO generally lead to Tinted Weapons of Effect +? (i.e Vampyric Sword of Flame +1, or Venomous Staff of Leeching+8, etc).
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Post by eggmceye »

Staves
They are there strictly to make casting and melee fighting harder. They are kinda useless as melee weapons. The enchants on them should enhance magic, and some do, some don't. I think I read cat say somewhere that a staff of xj should hex the target on casting the spell, not during melee - which I agree. This would make staves terribly awesome, if not too good. But it would be sweet.


Leeching
Kib jr has a full set of leeching staves, doesn't he?

I can improve the mere +3 by expanding leeching weps to:
wep of leeching (+3 dmg)
wep of leeching+1 (+4 dmg)
wep of leeching+2 (+5 dmg)

but does that really make leeching any less crap?

One the one hand I don't want perfect balance where everything is awesome but it does irk me when something is plain out crap. Leeching should be good for something, especially because it is taking up valuable 'enchant space' in the item coding system ...

Maybe leeching weps would be good for a spellsword on NG - esp if the +dmg/as on them could go beyond +3.
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Post by Gulnar »

I've posted at length about this before. I don't have my notes with my experimental results right now, so numbers are to the best of my memory.

I don't want to see everything awesome, but it does seems like most tints (except ebony for mages/vampy for fighters/rogues) are crap ATM.

I haven't played around with staves much. I don't think ebony does much good, the other tints just do even less (i.e., ebony isn't overpowered, everything else is underpowered).

Leeching: only works during melee, IIRC. Make leeching effect fire on offensive spell cast, maybe reduce mana gain if that would make it overpowered. I'd think +3 leeching weapons would rock pretty hard if spell cast gained mana.

Melee tints general: Apply tint bonus AFTER stat bonus in the damage calculation!!!. To reiterate my old (long) post, by level 40ish, BR weapons only do about 20% (not 50%) extra total damage due to having BR bonus applied BEFORE the stat bonus. Vampy HP gain calculation includes the stat bonus, this seems to be a major reason why vampy is so uber.


Assuming that tint bonus were applied at the end of the damage calculation, here's my suggestions for tint effects:

Vampy: 20% (on average) of damage dealt returned as HP (slight reduction from current effect, maybe could be somewhat buffed over current value for mage staves)

BR: 25% bonus damage (I think BR bonus should be a littles higher than vampy HP gain-if they were equal, I'd go for HP gain over increased damage every time)

Silver: 50% bonus damage vs. undead (current 100% bonus is reasonable with existing damage calculation, but might be overpowered if damage calc is changed)

Copper: 20% bonus damage and existing speed bonus and increased wear rate (I think copper should be slightly weaker than BR damage wise, if not equal. Increased wear rate will offset the usefulness of copper vis a vis BR.)

Gold: +1 NV (as now) and some other cool/useful effect. 30% damage bonus versus dragons? (Gold sucks currently. Needs some other bonus to make it worthwhile)

Venomous: Maintain current effects? Buff for PVM but not PVP? Not sure what to do with this. Good for PVP as it stands, not so good PVM. Would it be possible to make mobs lose HP more quickly from poisoning? As it stands, you'll probably kill a mob from regular hits before it takes any poison damage.

Diamond: Maintain current effects?(Haven't really done any hunting since the AS/def fix. Would've said that diamond was underpowered for fighter weapons with their base 27 AS from skills, and more importantfor rogues with their base 20-22 AS. There's still a rogue/fighter divide here, but even fighters need the extra AS from diamond now.)

Runed: Quadruple the current bonus critical fire rate. (IIRC, runed currently does about 8% bonus damage on average. IMHO, that should be more like 30%. Average damage bonus from crits for runed should be higher than BR damage bonus (25% for BR in my scheme), since the BR bonus is a guaranteed damage, but runed is chancy. Runed may not fire, so make it a little higher (on average) than BR to make it worth using)

Addled: Increase fire rate for PVM? (Tough to know what do with this one. Looks like PVP, MR reduces the confusion time currently. Fire rate is decent for PVP, but confusion time could be a little higher (or MR effect reduced?). In my tests, when I was hit with an addled, I hardly noticed the effect before it was gone. Addled definately needs to be buffed PVM to be useful)

Barbed: Maintain current effects? (Another one I'm not sure about-barbed is pretty good currently for shadowkin, and perhaps dragons. Kind of useless versus easier stuff, but I have no idea how to balance it better)
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Keighn
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Post by Keighn »

Keighn wrote:Leeching on staves; I have no idea if it works or not but I do know that vampyric works pretty well depending on the spell you use (IVPY mainly)

I haven't really tested addled weapons too much. I have no idea if addled staves do anything.

Barbed staves; I have no idea.

Runes staves are a mystery to me.

Venemonous weapons are great. Venemous staves work and I should use them more in pvp.

Naturally, Diamond, Blackrock, Adamantine staves work as expected to either inflict more damage, cut MR, or both depending on the tint.....
I just testing leeching via spell casting and it doesn't work. It might be a cheese if it were to work but then again perhaps not.

Barbed do cause bleeding in pvm and probably pvp. Just like venomous it is hard to tell when in pvm combat.

I've seen no effect while casting from runed staves.

Ash staves of course give +1 light. That's better than a regular staff so not useless.

Oak does more damage of course (forgot to put that in my last post).

I'm still befuddled about addled. I don't have one so I don't know if it triggers via spellcasting.

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

I'm kind of curious if perhaps there should be a tint that drains mana like venomous weapons. It would be more or less a tint rather than an effect like 'of leeching.' What the hell would you call such a tint? What effect would it have on pvm if any? Would protection scrolls block the eccect? Would bandages heal it (10 or 60 skill perhaps). This could lead to monsters having this ability. I can imagine the shock on a mages face when all of a sudden he notices his mana dropping like he's been poisoned.

Speaking of effects; what effect does disease have on mobs?
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eggmceye
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Post by eggmceye »

Melee tints general: Apply tint bonus AFTER stat bonus in the damage calculation!!!. To reiterate my old (long) post, by level 40ish, BR weapons only do about 20% (not 50%) extra total damage due to having BR bonus applied BEFORE the stat bonus. Vampy HP gain calculation includes the stat bonus, this seems to be a major reason why vampy is so uber.
If this happenend then high level players would be doing even more damage. Actually everyone would be doing more damage. I think it makes sense, BUT the stat bonus would have to be reduced. Players are already too powerful.
I'd think +3 leeching weapons would rock pretty hard if spell cast gained mana.
I started to code this and had it working some time ago. Then I realised that you might as well just give a mana discount for using a leeching staff.
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