[To Balance Random Loot] Give us a little more open choices on skilpoints.

[Kama_Blue]

I propose

1). The Cap for putting "120" points into a skill is removed, as it's meaningless when players have 2000+ skillpoints.

2). That on the respec screen, players can not only put 1 point into a skill with right click, but they can additionally take 3 points away from any skill with left click. 33% of these subtracted skill points are added to the available spendable skillpoints.

3). Points can not be subtracted past 0, and if equipping a piece of gear/loot would reduce your stats below 0 the action of equipping an item is denied (to prevent abuse).


The Result

1). Immensely improved loot quality all across the board, as items with abundances of skillpoints in previously value-less areas now are viable options.

2) Drastically improved character customization, changing customization from one deep layer (loot) and one shallow layer (skill points) to two deep interacting layers of complete choice customization.

3). Improved accuracy of "Green" loot, as *i think* it considers items an upgrade if they have more skill points overall than your current.

4). Reduced grindy-random-ness of endgame, to instead a more linear progression forward as loot gets better. Players no longer have to grind for hours passing up high-stat after high-stat item because they have a misplaced negative stat.

5). Greater mobility in terms of gear, players with say "A great DPS" gear set have the choice to shift some of those points to other areas when needed, abiet still be less effective than a pure "Tower Set" for instance.

I honestly think this is a really great way to push the entry level of nightmare down a bit lower, while consistently rewarding players for intelligent gear choices instead of mindless gear grinding.

What do ya'll think?

[jdvawter]

While I agree from a progression point of view I think it would make the game to easy.

[pedrogush]

And suddenly everyone can have a 5000 hp EV waller in one day. Goodbye difficulty, i'll just have my super walls tank all the mobs. For extra hilariousness i'll defend every map with a single pair of DSTs and some minimal amount of anti air defenses, and it'll still be easy if those changes are implemented.

[Kama_Blue]

And suddenly everyone can have a 5000 hp EV waller in one day. Goodbye difficulty, i'll just have my super walls tank all the mobs. For extra hilariousness i'll defend every map with a single pair of DSTs and some minimal amount of anti air defenses, and it'll still be easy if those changes are implemented.

Pretty sure to get an EV with 2000 + Wall stats, you need gear with 6000+ Stats to use up to put into that Wall stat.

So they already had the skill level/capabilities to find EV wall-gear in the first place.

No difficulty change. That's also why it's a 33% return and not 100%. Specialized gear will still do far better as it's not being penalized, so players who grinded out pure 2500+ EV wall sets will still have better gear.


And "Difficulty" is actually a false statement, random loot is actually "Fake Difficulty" or
#2 on
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

Where a randomly generated process is most-often the only thing standing between a player and character advancement. I agree that tower placement and build strategy play a huge role in advancing to later tiers of Survival, however you simply can't pull off those strategies without getting outlandishly lucky (or mooching) off of other players who have already attained that gear.

[pedrogush]

Pretty sure to get an EV with 2000 + Wall stats, you need gear with 6000+ Stats to use up to put into that Wall stat.

So they already had the skill level/capabilities to find EV wall-gear in the first place.

No difficulty change. That's also why it's a 33% return and not 100%. Specialized gear will still do far better as it's not being penalized, so players who grinded out pure 2500+ EV wall sets will still have better gear.


And "Difficulty" is actually a false statement, random loot is actually "Fake Difficulty" or
#2 on
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...FakeDifficulty

Where a randomly generated process is most-often the only thing standing between a player and character advancement. I agree that tower placement and build strategy play a huge role in advancing to later tiers of Survival, however you simply can't pull off those strategies without getting outlandishly lucky (or mooching) off of other players who have already attained that gear.

FYI, Raining goblins can be soloed with 200~300 stats across the board, from there you can get a Goblin Overlord's Charge that has 120~ in almost every stat across the board o, a 1000 total stats on those are not uncommon, if you manage to get one with 200 health you're golden (once every 8 drops, with controller emulation that turns out to one every two runs). Count in the fact the EV can hold two of those to easily reach, as of now, 600 Tower Health easily just from two entry level staves, now let's dump all of our EV's stats on health, that's another easy 400 right off the bat. So our EV who has no armor and no pet and is just holding two staves has 1000 health. Now let's assume the rest of the points on our staves are converted at a 33% rate to THP and we have 300 points extra in each of the staves. We now have 1200 THP, enough to have our walls solo the entire campaign and get an entry level mythic set. Now let's assume each of our set pieces has 100 THP after the mythic bonus, we now have 1600 THP, convert 230 extra stat points in each armor to THP at a 33%*(1.3) rate, roughly another 100 THP for each piece and we get a grand total of 2000 THP, enough to solo end game content. That's a day's work to get into the end game content as far as our walls are concerned. Now follow the same process for your tower builder to maximize TDamage and TAttackRate and BOOM!, we just broke through wave 30 mistymire.

And those numbers are being ultra conservative, the upper ceiling of what could be done if this was implemented is just ridiculous, it wouldn't be exactly hard to have a Lightning Tower with 2000 Attack and 2000 Range or a harpoon with 2000 Attack, 2000 Rate.

[Kama_Blue]

But sec, ill humor you and tell you how much my characters would get, in an actual environment and not a simulated -i-get-points-from-nowhere one.

(8 runs of raining goblins? what kind of normal is that?)

Right, so my EV has a total added of "6709" Assorted non-tower HP points, and this EV is using Mythical items that come from wave 26+ Misty.

Now assuming i don't want to entirely drop my speed (-363 Points) or all of my building speed (-600 points).

So that leaves her at "5746" actual skillpoints, and a base 422 Tower Hp.

Which when added together would give her 2337 Tower Hp skillpoints, putting her walls right in line with a player who's farmed an entire +400 gear set from 26+ Misty.


See that sounds absurd, until you realize they are literally a 0 attack, 0 hp, 0 decoy ect player. I think it's a valid point that boosting a single stat might end up with absurd numbers, specially in a broken instance like a player you only pull out for walls.

Maybe a +1000 limit on how far each individual stat could go.


But even then, i only see this major issue happening with walls, since that's probably the only role that only depends on one stat.

[pedrogush]

Now assuming i don't want to entirely drop my speed (-363 Points) or all of my building speed (-600 points).
The Character isn't out during combat phase, having anything more than 100 points in cast rate is completely wasteful. You should get 2.5k at least without that crazy assumption.


But even then, i only see this major issue happening with walls, since that's probably the only role that only depends on one stat.

And that's where you are hopelessly wrong. After the introduction of EV the towers that are inside the walls can be protected from ranged damage quite effectively via reflect walls, so much that the only damage they take is scratch from DEWs, add to that the fact that spider defense can be made a non issue if we max tower attack on a huntress for maximum spider ownage. Now take your squire builder and spec him for 300~ tower HP and 500~Range and just dump the ALL the stats in Tower attack and rate at a 2.5:1 ratio. Switch to your Barbarian/DPS EV who has been specced for Hero HP/Hero Damage/Cast Rate and just wtfbbqpwn every single map ever that trendy could ever think of releasing.

[tuderen]

I like the idea to be honest.

What's your main issue, pedrogush? That it makes the game too easy or that it takes away the grind? If it's about it being too easy, I can see your concern and it's something the devs would need to test fully before implementing. If it's a matter of removing the grind, then I would argue that there'd still be plenty of grind for better items afterwards, it'd just give newer players a chance to get some good gear without being pulled through by a friend or spending 2-3 weeks slowly climbing the ladder.

[pedrogush]

I like the idea to be honest.

What's your main issue, pedrogush? That it makes the game too easy or that it takes away the grind? If it's about it being too easy, I can see your concern and it's something the devs would need to test fully before implementing. If it's a matter of removing the grind, then I would argue that there'd still be plenty of grind for better items afterwards, it'd just give newer players a chance to get some good gear without being pulled through by a friend or spending 2-3 weeks slowly climbing the ladder.

My issue is making the game a joke to end game players. Nobody likes to grind, but the proposed solution would, depending on the choice of values for the implementation:
A) Be largely useless
B) Subtract the grind from mid-end and low-end and completely void the game of any challenge whatsoever for high end players.

[tuderen]

Well, there's ways to fix B. Maybe make it so only Mythicals can be modified. That way, it'll give starters an entry point, but trans/supreme gear will still be superior along with more RNG. Heck, even if it's godly and lower, it'd still be a great help for people to get their first foot into NM.

[Zenas]

The basic idea is good, I admit. However I do not think this exact implementation would give balanced results. Mostly because you can obtain stat numbers on dedicated characters that will be far higher then we currently have. Which as said, will end up making most if not all of the game a lot easier. No, I can't see this be a good way of doing it.

However, a good example for this that might be looked at as a base, is Reforging from WoW, changing 40% from one stat into another. Of course, only as example.

Something that might be interesting, is the ability to swap the amount of stat points between 2 skills. So For example you find an item with several really high stats, its really good, but has negative tower attack rate. Why not swap it with that really high movement speed as it hardly benefits at all after the initial 100 points? Of course, only one stat can be swapped at the time, so it is still entirely dependent on the item used, and in my opinion, better balanced, as it does not allow you to create outrageous numbers.

[Chaoslux]

Two things here:

You need to try and think as a game desginer, and not as a player.
The difference being that Trendy needs to find a way to bridge the gap. "We need to find a way to smooth out the progression." vs "Trendy needs to make the game easier for me"

But to give better feedback, your idea has merits, except its WAY too convenient. It needs to be on a 10:1 ratio (10 points to get 1 skillpoint) to make it less of an impact to specialized players, while still giving you a "slight boost". In the previous 6000 points. This is the difference between a 600 points increase vs a 2000 points increase. At this point, it looks somewhat more manageable, but would still very much be exploited to create very specialized characters that can only do one thing, but do it great.

The ideas Zenas presented are far more interesting. We could go on a Reforging way where you get to say, transfer 30% of one stat to another existing stat on that gear. (Yes, i did lower it on purpose), or you could transfer it into 60% of a stat not found on your gear. For example, a really great item that has high tower health, high tower range, high tower speed and no attack at all, but it also contains really high hero attack. You could suddenly make use of that piece of gear!
I acutally like the 60% to inexistant idea better than the 30% to "stack it up even higher". Because we're back to a scenario that seems to "force" you to stack up a certain stat to really high potentials.

The other idea of switching 2 stats is a pretty interesting one and while it does let you increase a stat you want to stack for example, it doesnt have the problems of the previous solutions for the reason that the stats do not become higher.
Say some gear quality cant go over 300 in a single stat. And can only have up to 1200 total stats.

1) Using the 1:3 transfer idea from OP. We just need to find a 300 stat item, then we can pump it up to have 600!
2) Using 1:10 transfer, we find that 300 stat and we can turn it into 390 stats.
3) Using the 30% reforging idea, we could turn another 300 stat into a 400 stat.
4) Using the switch, No matter what happens, you can get an item with the 300 you want, it cant get higher. But it would make the difference between farming 20 hours for THAT specific 300 or farming 8 hours for -a- 300 stat to switch.

3 of those scenarios creates items with Above-The-Cap numbers, which is the issue that leads to specialization being too powerful.

[The Ich]

I don´t like the idea of getting skill points from items which have just high stats but I agree to the point, that the skill-point system needs to be updated. 120 per skill is meaningless with 2k and higher stats.
There are other ways to improve the progression, for example: better rewards for beating something (challenge, boss fight ...) or move the drops of a wave number "n" to "n-1" or "n-2".

[imported_some_guy]

My issue is making the game a joke to end game players.

I think the it would help newer players and is a good idea.

What's the problem with making it easier for endgame players? They're already beat the game and usually aren't so much playing it as they are just farming the same maps over and over again for a piece of gear that might be just slightly better than what they have now.

It's only natural that the people who have put 500+ hours into the game find it too easy and I don't think they have much of a reason to complain.

[Chaoslux]

I think the it would help newer players and is a good idea.

What's the problem with making it easier for endgame players? They're already beat the game and usually aren't so much playing it as they are just farming the same maps over and over again for a piece of gear that might be just slightly better than what they have now.

It's only natural that the people who have put 500+ hours into the game find it too easy and I don't think they have much of a reason to complain.

The problem lies in the fact that new players normally look toward endgame players to "learn to play". Newer players generally try to have one hybrid character that do dps and put down towers. As they get much higher, they find out "Oooh, so i can switch in between waves and should have a tower and a dps guy!" and they start doing that. Soon after, they probably level a monk to put down auras. Because it helps them and having an array of characters is what endgame people do.
If such a system was addded, the players that are newer and also the players that have less time would go from:
I need a Tower Guy and an Aura Monk.
To
I need a Tower Health Guy, a Tower Attack Guy, an Aura Monk and a Casting Rate guy.

Or however crazy it turns out.

If Trendy is to implement something to help newer players, it need to be something to bridge the gap or make loot slightly less of an issue (ie: Swapping two skill numbers to allow a bit more flexibility), without giving endgame players the potential to turn the game into an even more complex system for an "easier gameplay" because you can be sure as hell that people would do it.

Here's a completly crazy idea to get the idea across:
If Trendy made it so that when you are naked IRL, your towers do 50% more damage, you would see people going "WELL IF YOU ARENT NAKED, YOU MIGHT AS WELL NOT PLAY AT ALL". Regardless of how retarded and/or disturbing they would look if someone were to check on them.