Class/magic: non-casters and hybrids

[PowerWyrm]

I've been thinking about this too. I like the idea of accomplished archers (with long/short bows) getting faster shooting speed, but the current implementation is way overpowered. My (and other people's) ideas so far include:

• Shooting speed tied to DEX
• Shooting speed tied to shooting skill
• Shooting speed tied to a specific class power (this already happens)
• Some sort of shooting speed modifier which works differently for the different launcher types (fast shooting doesn't really make sense for crossbows)
• Slings able to fire multiple shots, or even arbitrary objects
• Different shooting profiles for different races

As a first cut, making +1 extra shots actually +1/3 extra shots is maybe worth thinking about.

PWMAngband has Archers and I never was able to fully balance them. Whatever I do they are either obscenely OP or pointless vs other classes using base archery. I ended up giving them +2ES like Rangers but for any type of shooters and spells giving either flat damage or brands. This works well except for the stupid damage bumps at levels 20 and 40. I'd like to add fractional shots to counter that, so they get small shooting speed increases every level, just like the Monk class which in PWMAngband gets 0.1 extra bpr per level.

[Estie]

PWMAngband has Archers and I never was able to fully balance them. Whatever I do they are either obscenely OP or pointless vs other classes using base archery. I ended up giving them +2ES like Rangers but for any type of shooters and spells giving either flat damage or brands. This works well except for the stupid damage bumps at levels 20 and 40. I'd like to add fractional shots to counter that, so they get small shooting speed increases every level, just like the Monk class which in PWMAngband gets 0.1 extra bpr per level.

The reason you cant balance the archer is because, as a class, it is pretty well balanced as is - in fact I think of it rather as a lower tier option.
If you are adjusting the damage to that of a melee fighter (and call that balance), it will become pointless indeed.

The thing is that the weight on the other scale is hassle; an ugly and imo undesirable, but effective factor. The ranger pushes some ridiculous numbers when it comes to fighting the boss, but along the way, it is better to be the rogue.

The nightmare is a ranged fighter who plinks on endlessly, doing tiny pixels of damage for every normal monster. Even if he can do that undisturbed and has an easy time with it, its undesirable gameplay. My favoured take on this is burst damage. It was kindof well established in 3.0.0 or thereabouts with rare, but very damaging branded arrows. Unfortunately, it also requires the equally ugly non-stacking of ammo to work properly.

If burst is the solution, I see 2 options: for easy fights where you save resources, you eirther use basic arrows - probably in the form of a default attack not requiring any actual item arrows at all, and therefore no micromanagement - or you use melee.

Why dont you like the damage bumps at level 20/40 ? As a player, I prefer that to a pointless and barely noticable trickle of power from 0.1 bpr/level. It is something to look forward to and the phase of great damage is preceded by one of low damage you have to work through before the joy.

[t4nk]

The biggest hassle when playing a ranger is collecting arrows after fight. Consider making arrows always disappear after being shot. That will remove the hassle and also make rangers so balanced that perhaps increasing their damage will be a good idea (and increasing damage will also reduce the amount of keypresses when playing rangers). Maybe also introduce "magic quivers" that are infinite stacks of (weak) missles.
Some people will say "but that's not realistic!". Then these guys go ahead and play a game where zero dimensional characters take turns on a two dimensional surface, which is realistic enough to them

[Derakon]

There is a problem with that. Namely, that melee has a bunch of modifiers that affect its damage - straightforward +damage on gear, +str, +str/+dex which add attacks, extra blows, whatnot. Archery has only 2 - extra shots and might. That is already a bad situation if you compare the artifact list of the plethora of melee weapons with the few possible combinations for launchers. Sofar, a ranger might not necessarily prefer a bow with extra shots. If you give him extra might, he always will.

We're dangerously side-tracking this conversation, but this is a fair point -- I forgot to mention that I want to see Extra Shots, at least in its current incarnation, removed from the game entirely. The fact that Vanilla rangers get 2 extra shots completely free is just the most obvious way that it's completely imbalancing, but if you've ever played e.g. a priest and found a +2 shots randart, and discovered that despite what you may have thought you're an archer now because it's by far your best source of damage? Then you should know what I'm talking about.

I'm absolutely not opposed to giving other things to archers, and I'm all in favor of giving nice, chunky power boosts to them. I just don't think that extra shots fits into that worldview.

Perhaps an Archer class could get a set of spells that let them fire magic arrows from their mana pool, instead of real arrows from their inventory. The stats and per-arrow mana cost would depend on the spell, so e.g. they might start out with a spell that produces 1d4 weak-fire-branded arrows for 1SP apiece (roughly on par with Magic Missile), and in the late game they'd have a spell to produce *Slay* Dragon 3d4+10 ammo for 40SP apiece, or something like that. The idea being that they could start each fight off with a flurry of magic arrows that do good damage against their target (whatever it might be), but they'll run out of SP before the target dies, so they still need to carry physical ammunition. Meanwhile, against low-level enemies, they can just use the magic arrows exclusively, and not have any inventory hassle.

[EpicMan]

Perhaps Rogues could become the new archer class if they lose (most?) magic - then they fill the archer and stealthy niches. Maybe a U power that does non-fuzzy detection, or give them a telepathy-like detection power that automatically detects treasure and whose radius grows with level?

[10v24]

I've always liked the idea of removing spellcasting from rogues entirely, but giving them some sort of magic-device-related boon to make up for that. Always seemed weird that rogues were running around casting spells from magic tomes, but the idea that they come upon some nifty magic devices in their life of "treasure hunting" that they've learned to use well jives well enough.

I mean, even if it's just a flavor thing in giving them a unique spellbook they use that isn't called a spellbook, but rather described as ... I don't know, some kind of magical doodad that can be activated for the effects.

Rogues could have Sneaky Skills instead of spells. They require Sneak Points to use instead of Spell Points. They have to refresh their memory from Sneak Books, brown ?s that can only be found on the dungeon floor or purchased from the Black Market.

Listen -- uses super-sensitive burglar hearing to detect awake monsters (assuming even if they aren't moving around, they're making some kind of noise that could be identified). Maybe the hearing can only identify orcs at a certain distance but not what kind of orcs, etc. (Higher level versions called Listen Good and Listen Real Good)

Tiptoe -- Temporary boost to stealth. Maybe there's a Tiptoe the Best at higher levels which gives you temporary perfect stealth.

Puff of Smoke -- Makes a big cloud of smoke that prevents monsters within its radius from seeing you while you make your escape. Higher levels have Bigger Puff of Smoke, and Biggest Puff of Smoke

Greedy Feelings -- tap into your inner desire for wealth to intuitively sense when you're getting warmer or colder w/r/t where items and treasure are. (You could do a vaguer, closer-ranged Treasure Detection, or make it more realistic and figure out the nearest path the player can take toward each treasure / item (probably within some kind of reasonable limit), then weight each path length by how awesome the treasure / item is, shorter / more awesome path lengths add more to the greed score. Could be a timed effect, with a temperature gauge on screen. Greedier Feelings gives you a longer lasting effect. Clairvoyant Greed gives you morsels of information about specific items ("You feel dragon scale mail in the air around you..." "Something reminds you of extra speed...")

Stair-Listen -- uses burglar hearing to listen for footsteps on staircases (little known fact -- monsters run up and down the mazes of staircases making a racket which burglars can hear if they're close to stairs) (replacement for Stair Detection)

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Related: Rangers could have uncast spells, abilities that trigger reflexively. So while Rogues have to stop to listen, Rangers have an ongoing listening that kicks in more often and better as they develop their senses. Rangers have a keen sense of smell, which eventually allows them to detect monsters within a "line of smell" of them automatically all the time with high sensitivity. If there's a roomful of magic mushroom patches, you can smell mushrooms from the end of the corridor leading to that room. No thanks, you decide, and walk away. (Some monsters have pungent smells, while some make distinctive sounds, so the two senses complement each other.)

I guess if you wanted to make it realistic / complicated, monsters would leave smell trails.

Different races could be better at some things (maybe hobbits and elves would be good with hearing, while kobolds and half-orcs would be good with smell).

Under stress or otherwise distracted (HP below a certain amount, lots of monsters triggering disturb_near, for instance), these senses are less likely to kick in. Lots of monsters in an area muddles sound and smell.

[bio_hazard]

In what way?

It just seems like the discussion on the last page was dividing up abilities into sub-skills to differentiate the classes.

Increase Stealth? ---> Defensive Stealth (Ranger, Thief) vs Offensive Stealth (Assassin)

Increase Archery -----> Bow? Sling? XBow?

Minor Magic? -----> Nature? Healing?

It just struck me as being more like a skill tree than before, is all.


Some thoughts on making ranged attack classes more interesting

Archer- Allow Move and Fire in same turn.
Ranger- some sort of defensive bonus- like greater stealth while firing, or ability to give monsters another target, or something like that.

Any thoughts on changing gear restrictions? I've always thought priests (healing magic) should have a penalty to bows/xbows if they have a penalty to edged weapons. High-stealth characters (rangers, thieves) should have some of their stealth bonus dependent on non-clanky armors and shoes.

[Zikke]

Just a crazy idea I'll drop here since we're brainstorming:

Let a character start the game as something vague like "rogue" (meaning somebody who wanders from town to town, surviving and living off the land and from petty crimes to feed themselves, generally sneaky but too amazing), and when they get to some level (like 20 or 30) the player can choose a specialty like Assassin (major stealth attacks, dirty tricks, shadow magic aimed at harming or disabling others, better at combat while not as focused on escape) or Thief (also major stealth, magic based on illusion, haste, or other things that can help them escape or disable/confuse others, but average fighting skill).

Could be something similar for melee fighters or for the archer/ranger dichotomy you mentioned in the first post. Or between Priest and Paladin (big heals and Orb vs. combat-specific buffs) could start as a "cleric" which is a pretty generic holy-oriented person.

[PowerWyrm]

Just a crazy idea I'll drop here since we're brainstorming:

Let a character start the game as something vague like "rogue" (meaning somebody who wanders from town to town, surviving and living off the land and from petty crimes to feed themselves, generally sneaky but too amazing), and when they get to some level (like 20 or 30) the player can choose a specialty like Assassin (major stealth attacks, dirty tricks, shadow magic aimed at harming or disabling others, better at combat while not as focused on escape) or Thief (also major stealth, magic based on illusion, haste, or other things that can help them escape or disable/confuse others, but average fighting skill).

Could be something similar for melee fighters or for the archer/ranger dichotomy you mentioned in the first post. Or between Priest and Paladin (big heals and Orb vs. combat-specific buffs) could start as a "cleric" which is a pretty generic holy-oriented person.

You have this in many games: four basic classes (fighter, archer, wizard, cleric), then specialization at certain levels. Or skills you can buy with points (ToME).

[Nick]

For now, I think I'll go with Paladins and Rogues as I originally described; Rangers whose archery is toned down a bit and who get nature magic and some trickery, and Gwarl's evil warrior type (still need a good name for those). Probably a half-caster in each realm, as it turns out.

I'm not closing the book on this, though, and am interested in hearing any proposals for additions or changes.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

...Gwarl's evil warrior type (still need a good name for those).

Corsair (of Umbar)
Dunlending
Haradrim
(Men of) Carn Dûm
Ruffian

[Huqhox]

Corsair seems pretty thematic, the other Tolkien derived ones being more races than classes IMO

I quite like ruffian too, or thug. Bandit would match the existing monster list quite well

[Nick]

Thug was going to be one of the intermediate titles, and I like ruffian for that too. My current idea is that the big feature of the class will be sacrificing something (HP, stats maybe) for combat power; I've been thinking of names involving "blood" or "dark", but they're all sounding a bit fantasy-generic.

The point about the races is a good one; off-topic a bit, I have also been developing ideas on what to do with races, and will probably post on that soon.

[Voovus]

Myrmidon, villain, brute, miscreant, criminal.
(Not sure any of them fit - depends on what you have in mind.)

[Derakon]

Thug was going to be one of the intermediate titles, and I like ruffian for that too. My current idea is that the big feature of the class will be sacrificing something (HP, stats maybe) for combat power; I've been thinking of names involving "blood" or "dark", but they're all sounding a bit fantasy-generic.

Autoflagellator.