Experiences of a Fighter in 2.0

Saephis said:
If "Base" damage was related to how much build a Fighter/Rogue(/Hybrids) was a representation of how much build went into supporting abilities, it would make sense to function and even be relatable to Wand damage. However, as Weapon proficiencys are purchased -- and at an increasing cost as you go -- melee/archers are effectively "costed out" at a certain point, even on high build characters.

Not to intentionally open a can of worms, but there's a few avenues to keep these in line from what I see:
-Remove the "increased cost" aspect of weapon profs and backstabs
-Have weapon damage tied to how much build one has in that school, the same as Wands
-Add costs to Wands, the same as Weapon profs/backstabs

Currently, they're treated wildly different, but are relatively balanced.

Since you can't block Wand damage, outside of spells, that explains the limited charges "well enough."
Weapon Proficiencies and Backstabs have been a holdover in system for time immemorial. Could they change? Sure. Do they really need to? Not necessarily.
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To make sure I understand, are you saying you would prefer *no* changes to how weapon proficiencies work and to instead maintain status quo? (and I would say by connection, wands too)?

This is what I know I prefer so I want to make sure I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth by hearing what I want to hear ;)
 
mythic said:
@Graham Wolsey

I have just a couple questions on how the playtest was run for clarification.
1. Was it mostly PVP? Or was it PVE with PVP thrown in?
1a-Was there a "ratio" that you can point out (like 80% PVE and 20% PVP)?
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The majority of the playtest was against things out of the database. We fought Ogres, Golems, Undead, and Elementals. At the very end we had a single "ditch fight" style fight.

Our chapter makes use of a lot of monsters with class levels as a general rule. We usually are interacting with ogres, orcs, necromancers, and the like so while our chapter has almost no "pvp" in a traditional sense, we have a LOT of modules and field fights against player races with class levels. Our game is a high politics game where a civil war in the kingdom is occurring as well as having a group of monster races that want to take back their land from the kingdom.

mythic said:
2. If there was PVE, was there a variety of monsters to fight?
[/USER]
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Yep! See above.

[QUOTE="mythic, post: 281469, member: 15159"]

3. Were there scenarios like you would find in a weekend event? (like a "dungeon" to explore or "traps/puzzles"or "go kill the necromancer")
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We didn't have any traps and puzzles or dungeon crawl encounters. We had a variety of field fights and a few small group fights. Im sure if traps were present rogues would have had some added utility.

We did run the encounters as a full day style event where there was no reset for abilities to make sure we weren't skewing results.

mythic said:
4- Were the playtesters given any provisions to scale Magic Items and/or production? (as in, were you allowed MIs, if so how many? If you were allowed production, how much PP were you allowed to spend)?
[/USER]
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We were allowed to directly convert any magic items that our characters had over. For items without an equivilant we were given generous conversion rates to the extent possible, though some things (like my characters +2 sword) and my times per day spellshield and magic armor items didn't really have any option for conversion.[/user][/user]
 
Kasuni said:
To make sure I understand, are you saying you would prefer *no* changes to how weapon proficiencies work and to instead maintain status quo? (and I would say by connection, wands too)?

This is what I know I prefer so I want to make sure I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth by hearing what I want to hear ;)
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Yes, no changes would be great! Vastly preferable to the current state of things.



If substantial new skills and abilities were added to Fighters, a lack of sustained damage could be ok, but I haven't seen anything like that so far.
 
Kasuni we think a number of ideas from 2.0 that we have seen are great in theory, the execution is just flawed. We have a variety of ideas based on feedback from players from our chapter and others that we think would resolve some of the issues while maintaining the spirit of the new rules change. However, we do not feel like there is good avenue for us to present these proposals. We sat down with our owner and came up with some alternate rules proposals that from what I understand were pretty heavily shot down by other owners at a previous meeting, but you would probably know more about that than I do.

We don't hate all the changes and often agree with the reasoning behind why changes need to be made. I think most of us from our chapter agree that prof scaling is a thing that needs to happen in some form or another, and damage numbers overall are too high, but if you're going to take that away from us we need something to make up the difference and keep us viable. I don't think that we should necessarily revert to having proficiencies stay as is, but we need an avenue to make counter proposals that will actually be taken seriously and considered.

Edit: To clarify since Wolsey and my posts seem to contradict one another and I don't want to try and misrepresent our chapter when I say "we" I think that the vast majority of our players based on feedback would prefer no change than the current 2.0 rules as presented. That doesn't mean the new rules are completely bad, and I think we would be willing to accept new rules if our concerns are adequately addressed, but we haven't seen much of that happen yet.
 
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Graham Wolsey said:
I think that swinging 30s is a problem, but I also think throwing 16 prisons or deaths in a row is a problem. The rules only address one of these problems.
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Can you explain why you think it's a problem? IMO, it's something that can be scaled for, and how well it's handled ultimately falls to the plot team. We have people who swing for 30 and people who swing for 2 in our game, and through creativity we have excellent scaling feedback recently from a wide variety of levels.
 
Graham Wolsey said:
I think that swinging 30s is a problem, but I also think throwing 16 prisons or deaths in a row is a problem. The rules only address one of these problems.
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Even just eliminating Monster Slayer, Damage Aura and Constructs, I think almost all of the 30s that aren't 2 handed weapons will go away for fighters. In the current system without magic items that is 27 proffs or 405 build. There are some people who are that high of level, but frankly, if you are a 40th level fighter and you want to buy 27 proffs to do 30s, you should be able to do that.
 
Kasuni said:
To make sure I understand, are you saying you would prefer *no* changes to how weapon proficiencies work and to instead maintain status quo? (and I would say by connection, wands too)?
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That's correct -- As proposed, the changes to Backstabs and Weapon Proficiencies do not line up with the intent and other, related rules, I feel and risk creating poor player experience via very low level achievable effect(s).
 
Kasuni said:
Can you explain why you think it's a problem? IMO, it's something that can be scaled for, and how well it's handled ultimately falls to the plot team. We have people who swing for 30 and people who swing for 2 in our game, and through creativity we have excellent scaling feedback recently from a wide variety of levels.
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I can't speak to the success of making up for the gap between people swinging for 30s and swinging for 2s, but having a character 15 times more powerful than another is usually very rough to scale for. Our chapter largely doesn't have these problems. The worst case scenario for us is one person swinging for 10s and the other for 2s.
 
Kasuni said:
Can you explain why you think it's a problem? IMO, it's something that can be scaled for, and how well it's handled ultimately falls to the plot team. We have people who swing for 30 and people who swing for 2 in our game, and through creativity we have excellent scaling feedback recently from a wide variety of levels.
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Armor does not scale with weapon damage making it effectively useless in end game scenarios where an entire suit of armor can be eliminated with a single attack. Body also builds slowly enough in the current rules that it cannot keep up with the huge increases in damage from stacking dozens of profs. It also necessitates body bloat for NPC's who have to come out with hundreds if not thousands of body to survive and be an appropriate challenge to the PC's. This is difficult for NPC's to math, especially when you aren't swinging for a nice round number like 30 but something like 27 and I as an NPC have to subtract 27 from 700 a bunch of times. Usually it just ends up rounded to the nearest 5 when totals get that high.

As far as prisons go take out spells are not fun, and they just necessitate an ever increasing number of resists/cloaks/dodges/etc in order for NPC's to be a challenge. It's not fun for a player to have to waste a significant number of their 9th level spells blowing through resists and cloaks just to finally have one land, but it's also no fun to have your big bad monster be taken out with two spells.
 
Graham Wolsey said:
I can't speak to the success of making up for the gap between people swinging for 30s and swinging for 2s, but having a character 15 times more powerful than another is usually very rough to scale for. Our chapter largely doesn't have these problems. The worst case scenario for us is one person swinging for 10s and the other for 2s.
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I can say from experience that it is very doable :) It just involves some creativity. Seattle has solidly defined creatures so people know who should fight what. A level 40 and a level 2 character probably shouldn't be fighting the same things - it's just a matter of having a wide enough variety on the field and ensuring NPCs have proper instructions and PCs have the clarity.

Another example - SF did something super cool this last weekend that went over *amazing* with all levels of players. The Big Bad (tm) was summoned in a circle of power that only those under a certain build threshold could enter. So, only the players less than (maybe level 15ish?) could fight it. It allowed them to scale the Big Bad for the lower level players in the game.

There are loads of creative solutions, and I would prefer to have maybe some resources on solutions instead of trying to make everyone more "the same". I played the game from level 1 to level 42, and I remember the climb. But also seeing the "goal" at the end was a *huge* part of my excitement.

Thorgrim said:
Armor does not scale with weapon damage making it effectively useless in end game scenarios where an entire suit of armor can be eliminated with a single attack. Body also builds slowly enough in the current rules that it cannot keep up with the huge increases in damage from stacking dozens of profs.
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I would kind of agree with the Armor point. I see that it declines in value at higher levels, but I'm also comfortable with there being something that isn't as valuable at higher levels. There still is some value, primarily due to allowing players to temporarily withstand things like "5 nausea" etc.

Thorgrim said:
It also necessitates body bloat for NPC's who have to come out with hundreds if not thousands of body to survive and be an appropriate challenge to the PC's. This is difficult for NPC's to math, especially when you aren't swinging for a nice round number like 30 but something like 27 and I as an NPC have to subtract 27 from 700 a bunch of times. Usually it just ends up rounded to the nearest 5 when totals get that high.
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I'm more comfortable with NPCs rounding 27 to 25 or 30 than rounding 7 to 5 or 10. There's a much smaller % margin of error with large numbers. NPCs will always "best faith effort" estimate body. I know we specifically have NPCs with more experience play these 500+ body creatures so they (1) have some practice counting that much while fighting and (2) ensure they know to make the fight fun for all players - ie don't just roll over lower level characters - make it a good fight for the high level players, and have other things on the field for the lower level players.
 
Graham Wolsey said:
I think that swinging 30s is a problem, but I also think throwing 16 prisons or deaths in a row is a problem. The rules only address one of these problems.
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In my experience (YMMV), the high-damage swings help define the maturity of a character and player alike. The mature player who's put that much build into swinging a stick around knows "Don't go crushing those things intended for (much) lower leveled players." The mature character sees that and says "Those are there for people to be mentored through, taught how to fight better".

Like @Kasuni , I've played for an inordinate amount of time, starting at level one and have done nearly both the things you've described as problematic. The thing is, though, not every 'enemy' is for every character or player. Going through that experience, from level 1 to mumblemumble, you learn how to be a constructive, helpful player while still having fun on a subconscious level.
 
Saephis said:
In my experience (YMMV), the high-damage swings help define the maturity of a character and player alike. The mature player who's put that much build into swinging a stick around knows "Don't go crushing those things intended for (much) lower leveled players." The mature character sees that and says "Those are there for people to be mentored through, taught how to fight better".

Like @Kasuni , I've played for an inordinate amount of time, starting at level one and have done nearly both the things you've described as problematic. The thing is, though, not every 'enemy' is for every character or player. Going through that experience, from level 1 to mumblemumble, you learn how to be a constructive, helpful player while still having fun on a subconscious level.
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This is something I find to be really true, not just in Seattle, but I've seen it in Seattle, Oregon, and San Francisco. The long term players, if something is clearly identifiable as "not for them" will intentionally not chase it down. A big part of that is communication/clarity from the plot team.
 
I guess a good question for fighters is "how much is too much?"As in, how much per swing damage would be the "top" and when should a player be hitting that?
 
While we discuss this, it is important to take a few things into account. The monsters that go out in game when v2 goes live will not necessarily be consistent with what is in the database today, or even at release. Plot teams will have the capacity to change these numbers. More skills can be added, more body can be lumped on, and more defensives can be stacked. Character cards are bound by limits that monster cards are not. If it is presented that fighter abilities will be more effective now because the number of monster defensive abilities on cards have been reduced, this will only hold true so long as cards are never modified or created outside of the current database standards. I see the monster side escalation that some chapters are experiencing to be likely to resume, undermining a number of aspects of gameplay that are theoretically balanced due to the currently proposed changes.

Further, I strongly feel that the rules should be solid and equitable enough for all classes and all levels to meaningfully contribute, without needing additional specific plot design to make content accessible. The rules that are being crafted will be rolled out to all chapters. Not all chapters, or even campaigns within individual chapters, are necessarily as equally effective when it comes to tailoring and stratifying content to a diverse player base. The tool (rules) we are creating should work by design. It should not require additional extensive effort in order to make it playable. The additional effort should take things from playable to outstanding, but should not, by default, be necessary.
 
I really want to pipe in on this, I've got some thoughts, but we haven't had our playtest yet
 
Mythic, I find that the answer to your question tends to go hand in hand with Kasuni's two statements. There really isn't a need for a cap if you create a game culture that breeds responsible players. My one handed damage can currently reach 37. I could push 40 if I felt like changing some things. My team deals an average of 5-10. When we're on a module together, I drop my damage output to align with that range. Otherwise, I know that it's not fun for the NPC's on that module. Then, when the angry boss creature comes out that's clearly set up for high output characters, I throttle up.

If we had to implement a cap, I would not be opposed to what Saephis suggested earlier, where fighter damage increases with build spent in fighter skills. I do not feel that this is the best option per say, or the only one, but it's one I could understand the basis for and would accept with fewer reservations.
 
Tulbor said:
I really want to pipe in on this, I've got some thoughts, but we haven't had our playtest yet
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Reading rules is part of play testing, turns out. So's discussion. We've got some great discussion going on the last few days, so pipe away, I says.
 
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