More tangible skills and TLC for mages

News and suggestions during the development of The Quest's sequel. (Title is work in progress.)

More tangible skills and TLC for mages

Postby kohlrak » Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:16 am

One of the things i noticed with The Quest as it is right now is that skills are largely copy-paste and balanced seems to be centered around a low-level and very short game. Not only that, but the traditional class expectations don't appy: mages have the lowest DPS and have no penalties for wearing armor, for example. The way it is, the class system seems really dry, and it's not hard to go from being really underpowered to being really overpowered in a single hour, but it's also pretty easy to cripple your character to the degree that massive amounts of grinding are necessary, which are not very practical early game. Keep in mind, this is all based on the base game, not Catacomber's expansions, which have their own quirks.

I don't know how late it is to be making suggestions (i understand that the editor is largely done, but i don't know about the rest of the engine), but I wanted to push some ideas.

  • Skills need reimagined from the ground up. The scaling is disproportionate between classes (mages have high base, but slow increase, while the other two start out low but rapidly ramp up leading to the disproportionate damage output).
  • For the love of God, please get rid of the "2 skill points to level up minor skills" and just turn "major vs minor" into what starts high and low, 'cause you largely don't know what's important in the game until you've invested too far to go back and change it.
  • The spells system could not only use more classes, but could use more tangible effects. The drain health is separate from drain mana, and drain health is really the only useful undead spell that's unique, but even it's only useful early game when you're most likely dead in 2 or 3 hits. Necromancy where we can spawn allies/meat shields would make a difference.
  • Builds focus way too much on DPS. In the end, I regret making my Rasvim at all, because Attack Magic became a minor skill and i wasn't able to reliably predict the output difference from attack magic, and now it's what I use the most. Poisoning someone is not viable, nor is really much more than paralysis.
  • Mana management has become a "potion drinking simulator." I realize the turn-based system makes it much, much harder to put a handle on mana management, but mana costs vs damage output in the base game means I feel like an alcoholic when I don't even drink IRl. I don't know why my mage isn't peeing in his own pants in the middle of fights. The problem here seems to be the increase in mana cost of spells to go with their increased damage.
  • A party system, where you click on the map to tell the party members where to go (or just everyone sits in the same square like other dungeon crawlers) would make alot more room for a lot more skills and specialties, like playing healer, specializing in more specific weapons skills like crossbow vs standard bow, etc. Maybe only having control over your own character's leveling up could keep the game simple.
  • Allow respawning enemies (and make areas for enemies that don't respawn to become houses or something) to level up with you to some degree, with a randomly generated offset whose preferences can be determined with a difficulty slider (easy = -10%, normal = -5% to +5%, hard = +10%).
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