[crossfire] Crossfire 2.0+ features/priorities

[Anton Oussik]

On 29/01/06, Brendan Lally <brenlally at gmail.com> wrote:
> - an extension to the extension above, send health status along with
> monsters (probably as a percentage to not give away total hp), they
> can then have clients draw health bars above their heads.

As extension to your extension to the extension above, or even on its
own, some re-balancing of the game could be performed.

Last month I set my girlfriend lose on CF, and her biggest negative
feedback was that exploring was very difficult. You either go into a
new map and can kill everything without taking any damage, or you die
by the end the map finishes loading. Either outcome is not very
exciting.

Therefore a re-balancing to increase the margin between "that does not
even tickle" and "what was that which just killed me?" is needed.

In order to achieve that I propose starting with 3 changes:
  * DRASTICALLY reduce  the hp regeneration (something like 10-fold)
  * Significantly increase hp of players and monsters (3-10 fold)
  * Significantly lower resistances given by items (so a player can
get up to 25% resistance or so with several items)

That way there will be less reliance on item resistances, and it will
be easier to match a map difficulty to a specific level. Also a player
that enters a difficult area will not be killed before they have a
good chance to run away. As a side effect healing potions and healing
spells will then become useful. Monster combat will also take longer,
so running through a pack of enemies much weaker than you to gain lots
of experience will not be as useful. Perhaps a balancing test server
should be set up to allow finding the right balance.

As an extension to the aboce extension a new family or party spells
can be introduced. These will aid parties in combat by providing
spells like party heal, and party word of recall. Possibly party
strength, party wisdom, and so on can be introduced. They would be
high level spells that would act on all of the party, and will belong
to different magic schools.