Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

Ivan38Rus wrote:*Design content for melee builds, that don't rely on magic*
*Everyone uses their magic characters to defeat it and complains about lack of difficulty*
*design content with magic in mind, strong melee characters that don't need no magic suddenly become obsolete*

There is no escape from this nightmare.

Actually, the solution is to better balance the classes, not try to balance the content to one type of play style.

Oh look at that, an escape.

Boddynock wrote:

Ivan38Rus wrote:*Design content for melee builds, that don't rely on magic*
*Everyone uses their magic characters to defeat it and complains about lack of difficulty*
*design content with magic in mind, strong melee characters that don't need no magic suddenly become obsolete*

There is no escape from this nightmare.

Actually, the solution is to better balance the classes, not try to balance the content to one type of play style.

Oh look at that, an escape.

How do you balance classes that have access to spellbooks and those that don't?

Moltrazahn wrote:*just because* = "taking this feat allows you to use your consituation as your primary stat for attacking rather than your strength* = yaaaaaay :3

Switch that rather with ''along with'' and it'd be a pretty awesome feat.

burbles wrote:Melee builds always depended on magic in DnD. Bring magic-user friend - problem solved.

Which is bull, because casters can solo.

Ivan38Rus wrote: How do you balance classes that have access to spellbooks and those that don't?

You(well, not you personally) can start by giving the weakest classes more power, instead of the ones already ahead of the game.

You know, poor sods like barbarians and swashbucklers? The rapingly obvious ones.

Then, move onto the other melee classes. Things like AK's Spell Resistance(which was removed here), CON to damage for barbs and extra feats for fighters are prime examples of things we can use to power up the mundanes.

Inb4 someone mentions power creep: I don't think QC or the Dev team sees it as an issue, for obvious reasons.

I'm not complaining; these are legitimate suggestions.

As long as the melee'ers can catch up over the next few updates, I'm quite happy with any new content!

Ivan38Rus wrote:How do you balance classes that have access to spellbooks and those that don't?

Rest once per reset.

Ivan38Rus wrote:*Design content for melee builds, that don't rely on magic*
*Everyone uses their magic characters to defeat it and complains about lack of difficulty*
*design content with magic in mind, strong melee characters that don't need no magic suddenly become obsolete*

There is no escape from this nightmare.

Unless... make places like stone giants hold. You require a party to enter = party = whatever folk/classes people can srounge together. = profit?

Encourage grouping!

Swap the fighter for the Pathfinder fighter (or don't, because then I'd have to change my build again, because the Pathfinder fighter is just that much better than the 3.5 one)

Pathfinder fighter would be nice. A lot of the Pathfinder stuff is nice.

That's not really enough to bring the non spellcasters on par with spellcasters, is it?
Overall power of fighters will still depend on gear (content) and encounters (content) where as spellcasters will still remain with more utility, variety and overall PvE power I guess.

So really, how do you balance pure melee w/o touching content, men?

Daamien wrote: Inb4 someone mentions power creep: I don't think QC or the Dev team sees it as an issue, for obvious reasons.

Do elaborate thou

Ivan38Rus wrote: Do elaborate thou

The bard hath doth returned!

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."

Rest once per reset

hehe well then we need to bring back the wizard class as they sould be in the DnD book

Ivan38Rus wrote:How do you balance classes that have access to spellbooks and those that don't?

There are two ways:
1. You make non-spellcasters more powerful; or
2. You nerf spellcasters
(or possibly 3. You do both).

In fact what has tended to happen on BGTSCC is the opposite, if anything.

The simplest fix is obviously to make more powerful magic items available. If you increase stat items to +4 and weapons/armor to +5 you immediately remove one major advantage of casters.

There are also spells, like Mirror Image, that are much more powerful in-game than their PnP equivalents, due to Bugsidian's impementation. Nerf them in some way, e.g. decrease the number of images. Equally the whole real time/game time balance, which makes 1 minute/10 minute per CL spells too powerful could be fixed.

Really, altering the balance is relatively simple.

I like +5, but it's still favorable to casters since spellcasters save item slots. It might also not be a good idea to change it anymore.

It would be nice to boost non-spellcasting characters, somehow. Past updates, and the upcoming one, is all about love for spellcasters. The amount of content wizards have gotten in server history is outrageous comparatively. One problem that I see is that spells are free content to memorizing casters, while whatever melee upgrades comes along tend to require feat investment or if good enough, becomes tacked on to powerful spellswords.

Any boost need to circumvent that, like giving bonuses to some classes for heavily investing in the class. Barbarians, swashbucklers, epic rogues and man-at-arms are some base classes that could use a little something IMO.

Karond wrote:It would be nice to boost non-spellcasting characters, somehow. Past updates, and the upcoming one, is all about love for spellcasters. The amount of content wizards have gotten in server history is outrageous comparatively. One problem that I see is that spells are free content to memorizing casters, while whatever melee upgrades comes along tend to require feat investment or if good enough, becomes tacked on to powerful spellswords.

We discussed this while testing the new content on server2. As Karond mentioned, melee build have no space to choose new feats. A good way to add melee builds more flavor and make them more efficient is to give melee builds bonus feats from a specific list in accordance with the class abilities

Dor example, a barbarian can choose a feat every five levels from the shild bash or charge line of feats, a monk from the combat focus feat, a rogue from the sneak strike feats.

This would add flavor, more variety in combat and more importantly new content that will revive the interest in melee builds

DnD 5 partly fixed this by having concentration as a resource.

You still ended up with quadratic wizards, but the multiplier for the quadratic scaling is much, much smaller.

In other words, you had a limit of a number of buffs you could cast.