I was looking at some warrior characters and the issues that they have to deal with this morning, and I have come up with an indecent proposal on how to change strength and dexterity so as to make them 'more interesting' and more useful. This came about due to recent changes to the strength and dexterity spells, which screw warriors and thieves harder than I had expected.
Part of the reason strength and dexterity have come out so low on the equipment totem pole is that there are spells to compensate for it. Why should a builder bother to build equipment with strength and dex on it, when those valuable composite points could instead be used on stats like int and wis? After all, you can just use the int and wis to cast and maintain strength and dex spells.
With this in mind, consider the following two changes:
1) Limit strength and dexterity spells to a maximum of +4 boost.
2) Raise the boosting limit for strength and dexterity on equipment to +10. If you want 30 strength, you only need a natural 20 to do it, if you wear strength boosting equipment. Spells alone can only bring to to 24.
As an example, you could have 20 natural strength, add 6 through equipment, and 4 through spells to get 30 strength to wield a special sword.
Again, the reason for this is primarily to change the way that builders build equipment. The strength and dexterity stats on equipment are ill-favored, because they're so easy to replace with spells. Allowing stats to be able to do something that the spells cannot should tip this balance.
The only down side of this is that it will take some time for this to percolate through the equipment lists, and it will take time for equipment to be updated. In the short term to help bridge that gap, I would propose that the spells be limited to +5 instead of +4, with a temporarily lower casting cost. After 3-6 months the limit would be lowered to +4, and the casting cost slowly raised back up after that.
Any feedback on how you think this might be broken would be appreciated.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
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3 comments:
You crazy, homes?
This would be a good idea if you were still focused on building more areas etc. What you're talking about at this stage, however, is screwing over every player that has a hit set without any +str items (I.E. full of good old items like holy symbol of talos.)
So unless you're thinking about adding strength to a lot of old gear as well during this change, then you're going to be hurting a lot of players at the very least on a temporary basis.
doh the only +str eq i can think of is lev 5-20. i dont have str eq... i have ac eq that has -str! and dex for that matter.
We had a big discussion about this later on, and believe me, I got the point that some people would have to change eq.
I'm not sure its as drastic as you guys are making it out to be though; people came up with (sometimes unusual) replacements pretty quickly.
Regarding temporary basis, that's why I wanted to give several months for people to adjust and get used to things. Maybe if this goes in I should start with much higher str/dex spell values, like +7 or something, and gradually pull them down over time.
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