[crossfire] race/class lacks distinctions

[Wim Villerius]

On Sat, 2006-07-01 at 10:57 -0700, Mark Wedel wrote:
> Wim Villerius wrote:
> 
> > Well, this certainly makes sense for magic skills. Restricting a warrior
> > to lvl 25 magic skills doesn't hurt much - he wont use them often.
> > On the other hand, restricting a mage to use at most lvl 25 one/two
> > handed is a BIG pain and an unfair restriction. 
> > I have no clue how long ago you tried to kill certain powerfull
> > monsters, but being a mage it is literally impossible to kill
> > Lorkas/Gothwolthe/...
> > Magic is fine for normal critter - even up to grand titans and cyclops -
> > but it is simply _impossible_ to kill the bosses with that (granted,
> > Lorkas can easily be killed with diseases, but Gothwolte cannot - he's
> > an undead force)
> > In summary: this proposal makes it impossible for a mage to do really
> > interesting things for that requires weaponery at lvl 100+ (need a good
> > wc)
> > (note that this does not YET apply to charm monster)
> 
>   Some of this should probably be fixed by rebalancing of monsters.  While 
> perhaps difficult, pretty much every monster should be killable by spells.  Now 
> it may be hard, may take a while, etc, but should be doable.
> 
>   Some of this may be left over from what back before the partial resistance 
> code was put in - lots of creatures had immunity (100% resistance), and I don't 
> know if those were all fixed.
Some monsters are expected to be hard to kill. Gothwolthe is one of them
and IMO it is reasonable that only one attack type will kill him.
On the other hand, many monsters have 30,000 hp and 95% resistance and a
high regeneration rate. That combination is rather insane. It means that
in the time a monster regenerates X, more than 20X damage should be done
in order to kill it sometime. 


> >> But a lot is also the speed of combat.  IMO, combat is often so fast that it 
> >> is difficult to have much strategy.
> > Now that is indeed a big problem. Take for example Zorn (Brest
> > scrollshops) He can kill any player in less than a second, no matter
> > what the player does. (he is much faster and does 5 times more damage
> > than Gothwolte, to put him in perspective) So it's inpossible to run
> > away once he's angry.
> 
>   Even at lower levels, this is a big problem - if your caught in a bolt spell, 
> you need to get out of it pretty quickly or your dead.
IMO it is especially a problem at high lvl. Being lvl 114, having great
armour and lifesaving, you just don't expect to be killed in less than a
second. That's unfair, for it means that no player ever stand a change
against a creature such as Zorn.

>   There is one problem which is the major difference in number of HP for players 
> or monsters.  This means other spells cast by players tend to be pretty deadly.
> 
>   Typically, monsters have lots of HP but are slow relative to players.  Things 
> probably need to be brought more in line - make most monsters faster than they 
> are now, make most players slower than they are now (at least in terms of number 
> of attacks - even first level characters probably have a 1+ weaponspeed), and 
> give players more HP to balance out those factors (I figure it is easier to give 
> players more HP than to reduce the damager by all the monsters & spells).
Having players walk slower would especially hurt low lvls. For them,
walking is already tidious. But reducing weapon speed might make sense
since that is effectively reducing damge by two. OTOH this might render
some monsters really untouchable, namely if their
regeneration&resistance is so high that a player never can do sufficient
damage.

Increasing monster speed might not be always a good idea. Evil masters
are already lightning fast and since they run away when they're low on
hp, it's fun but hard to kill them. Kind of cat and mouse.

The only question that remains is what to do with players hitpoints. The
main problem might be that while players hp change linear (+2 each lvl
once they have max con) monster's hp go exponentially. So giving a
player 4000 hp max might make sense compared to big bosses, but that
factor is just too much for low lvl players facing goblins.
This suggest both to increase the basic hp with a factor 3 or 4 (newbs
die too fast) and increase the number of hp gained by leveling.