[crossfire] Rebalancing, difficulty curve -- simple ideas

[Alex Schultz]

Mark Wedel wrote:
> 1) Reduce weapon speed - in fact, I'd suggest that weapon speed be driven purely 
> by the weapon.  This fixes some other problems, namely huge amounts of damage 
> players inflict at high levels - not only do players get very high weapon speed, 
>   but they start doing a lot more damage, so effectively, at high level, a 
> character is probably doing 10 times more damage than at low levels.  Sure - 
> they should do more, but not sure if 10x is the right answer (and in this case, 
> high level may be ~30)
>   
Well, I'm not sure "huge amounts of damage players inflict at high
levels" is really so much of an issue, plus there are numerous monsters
that require such "huge amounts of damage" to be able to kill. (Perhaps
should those monsters have less regen/hp?)
Also, I'm not so keen on having weapon speed driven purely by the
weapon. It seems to me that the dexterity should have an affect on how
fast one could attack with a dagger, and strength should have an affect
on how fast one could attack with a longsword. That said, I do think the
weapon itself should affect it's speed more than than other things,
unlike now where the player primarily affects it.

>   If we change it to a percentile system, that may have an advantage of greater 
> variation, especially if the increase rate is reduced (1%/skill level?)  Why 
> that makes a difference is this - if you are in a marginally difficult to hit 
> situation (say need a 15+), it means that having a few objects that give you a 
> wc bonus, or being a few levels higher and having more bonuses could double how 
> often you hit (10+ on a d20)
>   
To me the range seems good at low levels currently, however I would say
that the range needs to be greater at high levels, so I think a
percentile system, or perhaps something a little fancier with a similar
affect, would be positive.

>   I'm not sure that ebbing/flow attacks would really make any difference - it 
> just means that when your hot, you kill a bunch of things quickly, when it goes 
> the other way, you don't kill anything - on average, it doesn't seem like this 
> would make much a difference, it would just seem frustrating to players (I was 
> able to kill these really quickly an hour ago!).
>   
Well, I don't think it would really be frustrating to players, as I was
thinking on the smaller scale, ebbing/flowing over the course of
something like 10 attacks. This wouldn't fix the
kill-low-level-things-in-one-hit issue, however it would have a similar
affect to reducing combat speed because it make it so the ac/wc rolls
don't average out over time so much, which is part of the

>   One other thought on this - the spells should be rebalanced/redistributed.
>
>   IIRC, crossfire originally only had 30 levels.  This is why for the most part, 
> the top spell level is about 20.
>
>   With 100 levels, this doesn't make a lot of sense.  Rebalancing spells is a 
> bit of work (as if you increase the level you get the spell, you probably need 
> to increase damage a bit, etc).
>   
IMHO adding more spells is also needed for rebalancing spells. With
current spells stretched over a range of 100 or even 70 or so levels,
gaining a couple levels in spellcasting may seem too boring to the
player, so adding more spells seems to make sense.
Also, meteor swarm is currently level 12, the quest to do it on the
other hand is only completable above level 50 or so, but certainly
doesn't take level 100 to do, so it makes sense to make a level 40-60
spells or so, but that leads to the question, if meteor swarm is moved
to there, what would be put above it?
>   But back in terms with cooperative play in mind, we may want to also focus 
> more on spells which work good in groups.  In particular, things like cones and 
> exploding ball spells probably are not good - bullets, bolts, summoned 
> creatures, healing, protective, make sense
Also, making use of some of the 'party spells' code there is could help.


Alex Schultz