[crossfire] combat, spell & monster balance

[Juha Jäykkä]

> > and bullet/missile-type spells pass right through (think of "beside") an
> > ally if shot from the next square, that is a fighter could block the
> possibility is to only do that skipping of spaces if folks are part of the
> same party.

This is what I meant by "ally". Only pass through a member of your party. 
Hence no problem on PK or arena.

>   My personal thought is there should be very few/no monsters that are 100%
> immune to magic.  I know in some cases this is because you have groups of

While I tend to agree, things will change dramatically if high-level magic 
becomes "non-magic" (as in attack type does not include magic) as was 
discussed earlier. That would remove the problem of (high level monsters) 
having 100% magic resistance. It would still leave room for difficult 
monsters at high levels.

> fairly common.  And I think some of the changes that are being made as part
> of these balances will result in it becoming much more difficult for mages
> to fall back to melee attacks.

This is fine, although I do not understand your reference here. Falling back 
to melee has always been difficult at least for fireborns. Fireborns get 
killed quite easily by beholders even as is. (Unless you are high level in 
karate, but that is extremely tedious work as a fireborn.)

>   What this means is that a map with beholders (if 100% immune to magic)
> may be virtually impossible for magic users, but those beholders may only
> make up 10% of the map - that is sort of a waste of a map now.

This is a multiplayer game. I think having maps that are virtually impossible 
(or even impossible) for a single character of a given profession, is quite 
ok. Of course those maps should be relatively rare and give better than usual 
rewards to encourage teamplay. Almos impossible, however, is not as bad as it 
sounds. It just means you need to use your wits. =) I can kill the beholders 
with a fireborn without using melee or spells with magic attacktype: animate 
weapon, summon <something> and such come to mind. (At high levels, 
dragonbreath does not have attacktype magic, so it works nicely. Also, Gaea's 
banishment works.)

>   Spells need to get rebalanced - once monsters hp and the like are
> adjusted, it then makes it easier to balance spells.

I agree: doing things one step at a time is a good way to proceed. Once melee 
is in balance, it should be easy to balance magic and combinations of melee 
and magic etc. Once we have a baseline, things get easier. And melee is 
probably the easiest to balance, so it's best to start there.

>   Note that there is also other tuning going on here - the actual cost in
> spell points adjust things.

Those were just attack-spells, there would probably be others, too. I really 
liked the idea of earthquake and world-modifying spells at very high levels.

>   But in order to prevent player killing, none of these spells should
> probably do more than 25% of a players total HP damage in one hit.  This
> means if players at the level have 100hp, and monsters also have 100hp, it
> would take 4 spells to kill those monsters (about).  Now as noted above,

Apart from attacktype death spells, this is fine. Single spell to kill is 
probably too powerful, but the mage will need to be able to cast several 
spells within relatively short period of time lest the mages will never be 
able to go around alone.

As what comes to attacktype death... at least single-target spells with such 
attacktype should exist in my opinion. But probably not at any low levels.

>   Right - but I think the thinking was that even at really high level with
> single boss monsters, a battle may take 30 seconds - a lot longer than now,
> but not so long as to be tiring, especially for boss monsters.

30 seconds is a blink of an eye. I was talking of about order of 30 *hours* to 
get a bunch of cyclops out of the way. That was too much. But on the other 
hand, 30 seconds is too generous, I think. I would say spending even 30 
minutes battling a single "final" battle of a quest would be fine - IF there 
is some signs of progress along the way. Like killing 25 cyclops one per 
minute and then the final boss in 5 minutes. That would be fine with me. Even 
longer, if players need to heal in the middle, but what is most important is 
to make sure players know they make some progress! Probe is a good spell in 
that regard, but a) not everyone has access to it and b) thinking of cyclops 
again, you almost never get any real info out of those (because they heal so 
fast that by the time you've backed off and cast probe, they're at maximum hp 
again). The easisest way of showing players they're making progress is by 
having more than one monster and letting the cannon fodder die relatively 
easily, but still wearing the players down for the boss to finish off (or die 
trying =) ).

> fight. That expectation is based largely on exp of creature - at level 40,
> killing level 5 creatures is a lot less dangerous than when you were level
> 50, but the amount of exp you get, related to how much you need for next

An extra 0 here?

> level, is such it probably isn't worthwhile.

Exactly.

>   Likewise, a level 5 character could attempt to take on higher level
> monsters, with it being appropriately more difficult, but they also get a
> greater reward.

This reminds me of the problem with a team of 50th and 5th level character... 
How to handle the exp so that the 5th level character does not jump to 25th 
level in a couple of minutes?

>   A lot of monster speed was really slow, relative to players.  There are
> very few monsters that players can't easily outrun, because the speed of
> them is so slow.  I'd almost say that speed of most monsters should be
> increased, but that changes balance a whole bunch, so having slow monsters
> isn't that big a deal for the most part.

I think players were too fast relative to everything else. While traveling the 
big worldmap would be very boring if players were too slow, I also think it 
is very stupid for characters to be able to outrun magic bullets, speedballs, 
magic missiles and such, which currently is almost trivial. Since monsters 
are slow, spells are slow and we want to make battles longer (or at least 
slower-paced), I think slowing down players is really the right way to go - 
like you already have done.

-Juha

-- 
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		| Juha Jäykkä, juolja at utu.fi			|
		| home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/		|
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