NG+ balance

[coyot]

Started NG+ with level 20 story characters only. And I have a suggestion for XP rewards. The very first battle with Ketta that can be played on multiple difficulties has rewards 475, 7500 and 15000 XP. The one for normal is way too low and the two for advanced and Extreme are way too high. With Slak and Ketta it was just about doable on Extreme (without any respeccing etc) - and I gained more than 2 levels on that single map.

I know that scaling with party is not very popular, but I think that it would be actually good for the balance if the rewards were scaled to the highest-level character in the party - so instead of being fixed 475, 7500 and 15000, they could be calculated to be i.e. 20%, 30% and 50% of XP needed by your toughest character (or Azra) to level up. Given that there are 32 battles + 7 sidequests (bonus battles excluded), we're looking at 39 fights. Let's round that to 40. If I play the NG+ game on normal only with no grinding, I'll gain 8 levels. If I play on advanced, I gain 20 levels (20%+30% * 40 fights) and if i play on Extreme, I will gain 40 levels (20 + 30 + 50% - in other words, one level per map).

This would ensure reasonable levelup progress without making it either too fast or too slow in the early battles.

[coyot]

Another experience - phasing+regen is a horrible combination. I guess that the regen could do with some nerfing, especially on the tough worms. Level 6 tough worm regenerates 100 hp per second and with the phasing thrown in, it requires a huge concentration of firepower to kill one (as in "very much out of proportion compared to other creeps").

Also, I again call for all area effects including spells to hit dark and possibly also phased creeps. (I think that at least once I've seen pushback fail on phased creep, intentional?)

How about giving Azra an anti-phasing aura or something? Or give it as trait to healers? Their tree is pretty humble...

[Anthony]

Ooh, that's definitely a bug with the XP calculations. Thanks for pointing that out. The XP for those units by my spreadsheet should be 139, 335, and 458. Those are going to be a bit low, but that's because so few enemies are present in those levels. I can't change that, though I can bump up the one-time bonuses (which are so far unchanged from the normal mode - haven't gotten there yet).

Regarding auras, I'm pretty sure that's just simple a no-go option. We need to get the game done and live, and adding and entirely new type of attack calculation is going to introduce new bugs and problems that we don't need at this point. We're pretty much at a feature freeze now - adding new content and art and tweaking numbers, but minimizing coding as much as possible. I understand what you're saying, and if we do a sequel I think we'll definitely add auras (originally there was a Paladin unit who was going to use auras), but it's just not practical at this point. :/

I'll play around a bit with the phasing worms - perhaps the regen does need to be dropped a bit. I'm not sure how pushback works on phased creeps, though missing them doesn't seem unreasonable.

[coyot]

Thanks for the response. I completely forgot about XP from killing creeps - but it turns out that they're not a very big number either.

Example: Battle 7 (Old friends, new enemies) 8 + 8 + 16 + 30 + 20 + 30 + 20 creeps level 2-6 - 332 XP from battle. Advanced (levels 8-13) yielded 707 XP from battle.
What's your target audience for this battle on Normal difficulty in NG+? I am there with a level 26 party (although minimalist, Ketta and Slak only) and they take 14k XP per level now. So, there'd be almost no level progress for a long time. (11+ battles on advanced = 1 level) Is that intended? I think that making the XP reward dynamic based on Azra's level would give you a better control of how the party grows.

Sure, auras were just an idea for implementation - but having some method of removal of phasing wouldn't hurt. Maybe, instead of a "new" attack mechanism, it could be attached to some normal area attacks, just like we now have dealing with dark creeps.

And would you consider making at least dark creeps vulnerable to any area attacks? While it makes sense that a dark creep is hard to hit individually, I don't see how being dark helps them avoid a blizzard

Also, there's a bit of implementation inconsistence - while burn and poison are applied in one-second increments (and shown in battle), regen seems to be applied continually and of course not show other than the health bar growing. This inconsistence makes it tough for the player to figure out the net balance of the effects. Could it all be converted to the same system? (whether it's one-second steps or as-fast-as-possible steps, I don't really mind, as long as it's consistent)

And yes, pushback missing phased creeps seems logically reasonable, but it's really a pain

[Anthony]

The XP bonuses from killing enemies ramps up pretty quickly. In acts 5 - 7 on Normal you'll be pulling in 2k - 4k in creep XP, on top of whatever we set the level bonus XP to. So you'll level up a lot faster after you get through the early bits. However, yes - it is intended to only have it taking 5 - 10 battles to level up. We're leveling up quicker than I'd like, but this is the best I could do for now. The reason is that it's also intended that you'd have a larger party - somewhere in the 15 - 25 range on average, so you'd have 1 or 2 people leveling up per level on average. I realize this isn't how you're playing, and yes it'll be much more spread out for a minimalist build, but it is intentional. Still, I think you'll find that later levels will still level you up reasonably quickly. I really don't want to scale anything based on level at this point - the system is in place and is functioning well, it's just too late to make major overhauls.

I could see making dark creeps vulnerable to area attacks. The idea with phasing is to have you have to place defenders at spots to line up with phased-in times. We actually have the ability to really change the phase times on a per-wave basis, but so far I've left it at the defaults since that seems more reasonable for the players. If regen is too high, that's a problem to fix, but phasing is a positional mechanism to slide the player's placements around.

The implementation of regen is up to Lars. I'd be happy to have it match negative status effects, but he's the one who knows how it's coded up and whether or not that's feasible or practical at this point.

[coyot]

The XP bonuses from killing enemies ramps up pretty quickly. In acts 5 - 7 on Normal you'll be pulling in 2k - 4k in creep XP, on top of whatever we set the level bonus XP to. So you'll level up a lot faster after you get through the early bits.

I've played NG starting with I think level 21 or 22 party. Now I'm almost through the town (I think it's 18 battles excluding side quests), that's 3/5 of the game - and my party on average gained just about one level, excluding the one map with a huge reward. So, Slak and Ketta and Azra are level 27 and everyone else is level 22.

However, yes - it is intended to only have it taking 5 - 10 battles to level up. We're leveling up quicker than I'd like, but this is the best I could do for now.

We're levelling much slower in NG, not quicker!

Based on my earlier plays of normal, these are the possible starting points for NG:
1) Level 16-18 (all battles on normal only, no grinding, large party)
2) Level 21-22 (small party, only enough grinding to beat the game
3) Level 26-28 (all gold stars, large party, in other words what one expects to be normal play)

It feels to me absolutely wrong that playing through 60% of the NG, these parties will shift to 18-20, 22-23, barely 27-29. It's a very small consolation that I'll level up quicker later - and it again emphasizes the other problem, lack of difficulty scaling in NG.

the system is in place and is functioning well, it's just too late to make major overhauls.

While I might agree that it's just too late to make major overhauls, and I can hardly contest the fact that the system is in place, I dare say that it is NOT functioning well at all.
No offense meant, but from entertainment point of view, NG simply does not work. Yes, there's some fun with sidequests as the maps are quite interesting, but other than that, just pure boredom. No matter how strong or weak your party is, the number of levels that will be fun and challenging to play will be VERY narrow, and party size/strength only determines how many levels of easy boredom you will have to endure before you get to the few challenging ones. (This applies especially to any "normal" parties - yes, I've had some bits of challenge with my tough challenge of using just story characters and no shopping - but if I had level 18 party without many restrictions, most of the early levels would be a total piece of cake - AND given the lack of leveup progress, it'd be just a matter of rather boring time till I hit a brick wall).

I've resigned on the idea of the monsters scaling to Azra's level, but I think that at least the XP rewards should be scaled. Because if your intentions are to level once every 5-10 battles, then with creep XP constant, the only way to achieve this really IS to scale the mission rewards in NG - either scale them dynamically with Azra's level, or at least boost them by a fixed rate, that of expected party level when starting NG.

Given that reaching NG below level 20 takes serious effort, I think that level 20 could be a good reference value. If a level in Normal game has expected audience party level 10 (and XP reward constructed so that they'd get anywhere between 10-20% of levelup, to meet the goal of 5-10 battles per level), then NG reward for the same party should be adjusted so that it'd give enough XP to be 10-20% of a level for level (10+20).

That will at least enable you to have some party growth in NG.

The idea with phasing is to have you have to place defenders at spots to line up with phased-in times.

With said phased-in times not documented, it's rather tough to place defenders at the right spots. Does phasing depend on distance travelled or time? (In other words, is the phasing the same in space for creeps of varying speeds?

If regen is too high, that's a problem to fix, but phasing is a positional mechanism to slide the player's placements around.

Well, it's regen together with phasing that becomes a bit of a problem, especially given that we do not have intelligent targetting methods. If you have a tough worm wave followed by a faster weaker wave, there's absolutely no way to reliably focus fire on a particular tough worm, too. This and phasing together mean that the worm will have an awful lot of time to regenerate. Basically, in my challenge play, most levels were piece of cake except the tough worms, and these made it next to impossible.

Also, the big problem of regen to me seems to be that the values more or less follow base HP (and scale with creep level, too). Example - the level with Honor's vindication as a reward, there's 5 abominations - and in NG+, they have regen - and they regen so fast that 2000 PSI-worth of boosted and damage-optimized defenders couldn't even kill one. (I think I had Markos(22-5) and Ketta(27-5) and Slak (27-4)).
Regen of double-splitters is 75+10*level and HP is 6000+800*level, so the weakest ones in the extreme level there will have regen 365 and HP 29200 (or maybe 355 and 28600).

If you can put something like 1500-PSI worth of attackers against this creep, you'll need about 25 seconds to kill it without regen and about 32 seconds to kill it with regen. That's quite a difference, and it's based on quite decent firepower of 600 dps (taken from a decently optimized berzerker level 30 at 675 PSI cost). If your total firepower is lower than some 1200-1300 DPS, then the regen becomes a real pain. DPS 1000 - 30 seconds for base kill, extra 10 seconds. With DPS 730 (double of the regen rate), the killing time grows to 40+20 seconds.

And the last abomination in that map regens at 525 hps and has 33k HP.

In other words, regen linear with creep base HP and level grows into quite obscene numbers, increasing the total damage needed to kill the tough monsters really out of proportion.

[Anthony]

I'm sorry, apparently I haven't been clear. I haven't modified the 1-time XP bonuses for each level yet at all. Those all need to be bumped up which should help with the leveling slowness that you're seeing, especially for the first half of NG+. Also, please keep in mind you're playing in-development, un-balanced builds. If you're looking for a clean, balanced, *fun* version to play, please wait until we release it.

Don't get me wrong - your feedback is tremendously helpful and valuable, but I need you to keep the context in mind that this is a very unfinished product that you're using. I'm just about finished putting all of the side quest waves in place and haven't really begun the balancing yet. Once the content is there I'll be able to have a bigger picture and turn the dials to make the experience better.

As for the difficulty of level, while I'm going to continue to work on that, as I've said from the start the star-system of picking your difficulty will allow you to tune the experience. You don't have to beat the easy level to unlock the medium level (if you did, your argument would be much more valid), so if you're finding it too easy you can just start playing on the next set of stars. It's difficulty controlled by the player, and as long as the lowest difficulties aren't too hard (which they could be at the moment) and the highest aren't too easy (which I don't think is a problem right now) you'll be able to find a set of levels that make sense for you. Sure, it might only be 30 or 40 of the 120 levels that work, but that's another 30 - 40 levels to play through with your party.

To be honest, I'm actually not sure how the phasing works. I *think* it's based on tiles (i.e. distance traveled), but Lars will need to answer that one for sure. I could also look and see how attackers behave, since they stop and attack which would throw off the timing. You're right that it's not documented, but it's always the same pattern for everyone right now, which if I remember correctly is 2 tiles on, 2 tiles off. If we changed the patterns we'd definitely need to provide that information, but so far we haven't.

You're right that regen is a linear growth - which means that it is essentially a % regen (i.e. gains 1% of health per second). I'll give it some play too and see if I need to make it a softer curve for the regen values. I want them pretty high early on, but you make a good point that at the higher levels it may get out of hand. That said, I'm constantly surprised with the performance of players, and I want to make sure there are some challenges for people who have fully maxed parties - gotta have something for everyone. But yes, point duly noted.

[coyot]

I'm sorry, apparently I haven't been clear. I haven't modified the 1-time XP bonuses for each level yet at all. Those all need to be bumped up which should help with the leveling slowness that you're seeing, especially for the first half of NG+. Also, please keep in mind you're playing in-development, un-balanced builds. If you're looking for a clean, balanced, *fun* version to play, please wait until we release it.

I know . I'm just saying what I think the levelling speed should be - and given the spread of starting levels in NG to be approx 16-40, or 16-30 taking grinders away, it will be hard to achieve without at least some scaling.
Unfortunately the same goes to the gameplay itself - it's simply not possible to make NG as a whole reasonably challenging to level 30 without making it unplayable for level 16, or challenging to level 16 and utterly boring to level 30, but we've had this discussion before and there probably is no feasible solution.

As for the difficulty of level, while I'm going to continue to work on that, as I've said from the start the star-system of picking your difficulty will allow you to tune the experience. You don't have to beat the easy level to unlock the medium level (if you did, your argument would be much more valid), so if you're finding it too easy you can just start playing on the next set of stars. It's difficulty controlled by the player, and as long as the lowest difficulties aren't too hard (which they could be at the moment) and the highest aren't too easy (which I don't think is a problem right now) you'll be able to find a set of levels that make sense for you. Sure, it might only be 30 or 40 of the 120 levels that work, but that's another 30 - 40 levels to play through with your party.

What I hope is that NG will offer a "standalone" entertainment in the sense of always making it possible to level up simply by playing an earlier battle at high difficulty - that is, no real grinding, just collecting more gold stars in the style of "let's see if I can beat this right now, or if I'll need to do a few earlier missing extreme battles..."

You're right that regen is a linear growth - which means that it is essentially a % regen (i.e. gains 1% of health per second). I'll give it some play too and see if I need to make it a softer curve for the regen values. I want them pretty high early on, but you make a good point that at the higher levels it may get out of hand. That said, I'm constantly surprised with the performance of players, and I want to make sure there are some challenges for people who have fully maxed parties - gotta have something for everyone. But yes, point duly noted.

Maybe for a start not boosting regen with levelups? Because, the average monster will regen up more points anyway on higher levels, taking a longer time to kill. (monster HP seems to grow a bit faster than party DPS, especially early within a map when the party is far from maxxed due to Azra's limited PSI)

As for challenges for everyone, I think that the game mods would be great for this. I mean, if you try to create maps that will be challenging for 36 level 40 characters (to please everyone), you're working for a very small subset of community. I think that your goal should be to make the game reasonably challenging for a casual player, not to a maximalist. I think we've shown that we can find challenges ourselves, be it no grinding, no shopping, no recruiting, no recalling or combinations of thereof. IMO the game difficulty should be measured against a "normal" play style, which to me is something like 80-90 gold stars without grinding, which will produce level 25 or so party, without any requirement for expert play. (I've played that way the very first time, looked up my old save and boy, some horrible skills I had there - now I know how to do things much better). So, this "nothing-special" play style should IMO be the target for "normal" difficulty in NG+ as well. That would require very good skills and decisions by those who beat the game with much lower levels (16-18) and small parties, but in most cases they'd be able to cut it...

[Anthony]

Thanks coyot - all seems reasonable. My goal is to have a few challenges for the top, maxed players (because there certainly will be those), but I don't the main course to be tuned quite at that level. This is all NG+ too, so we're talking bonus content on top of what was already a decent-length game. In any case, I guess you just kind of freaked me out because it seemed like you were pouring lots of time and effort and thought into something that was still unfinished. Your observations were correct, but I felt like I was wasting your time because it was not really ready for scrutiny at that level.

I think you're right about toning down regen, but I think what I'll do is just make the linear growth lower. These are done with a base value and a linear addition - I can keep the base the same but make the scaled addition smaller to level out the curve and make it less insane as they level up. Anyway, digging in for the night, trying to finish up the content so I can finally address your balance concerns!

[coyot]

I think you're right about toning down regen, but I think what I'll do is just make the linear growth lower. These are done with a base value and a linear addition - I can keep the base the same but make the scaled addition smaller to level out the curve and make it less insane as they level up. Anyway, digging in for the night, trying to finish up the content so I can finally address your balance concerns!

Just a clarification - regen on normal creeps is OK, just enough to make it impractical to use the softening approach, to force the player to do some firepower concentration. It becomes a problem only when the base creep HP is big and/or with phasing creeps that are guaranteed periods of safe recuperation.In other words tough worms and doublesplits.

[Anthony]

Yup, understood. I toned down both of those a bit (I don't think it's up yet) and I'll test them over the weekend. Hopefully Monday I'll have something that's actually ready for your deeper investigation. I love the feedback, I just want it when we're a little closer to prepped. Have a great weekend!

[coyot]

Another question - are the hermit sword upgrades supposed to be final? That is, is it intentional that all unique swords upgrade to 60 attack bonus?

[larsiusprime]

Haven't quite decided - that's up to Anthony.

What exists as of right now is total placeholder that is just there to demonstrate/test the upgrade system.

The idea is for all the unique items to have some high base stat (some will probably be higher than others) and in addition, have a +bonus to your main stat (attack for weapons, defense for armor), along with some unique specials for each item.

Also, in NG+ we've added "+" variants of all the normal items - basically, we just buff the stat, raise the price, wave a hand and say they're "enchanted" and stocked store shelves with those. So, you can probably buy some regular equipment that might even be better in terms of raw atttack/defense stat than an upgraded unique, and in a rare case might even come with a special ability. However, I'm thinking none of the store-bought items will ever have a +bonus to attack/defense. This means that a great store-bought item might outclass a weak upgraded unique for 10 levels or so, but in the long term upgraded uniques will "grow" with your characters and remain useful even in endgame.

That's the idea anyway. Anthony's working the spreadsheets and figuring out the details.

[coyot]

Thanks, sounds great

[coyot]

I think that NG+ Zelemir needs a boost in level. I got there in the toughest challenge mode (no shopping, no recruiting, almost no grinding, only 7 extra stars on low levels), with party level 28 (azra slak ketta) and 25 (rest) - and with the help of hermit-improved weapons (but not the critical/bleed ones), I managed to kill zelemir easily right after the first wave started. And I believe that even without the hermit weapons it'd be doable if I optimized my skills. (More rage on slak, more frenzy on Azra).

In other words, Zelemir is too weak even for almost the minimal strength party that can reasonably reach him. (I had some pretty close battles before).

As a test, without squad skill optimization, I was able to score about 450k damage on Zelemir before first creeps reached Azra (not counting one that I finished with 1 lightning as he got seriously clobbered passing Slak and Ketta).

So I would say that Zelemir's HP on Normal should be at least 600k on Normal and some 800k on advanced, in order to force the player to deal with the creeps as well, not just pwn Zelemir.

[coyot]

And a bit of down-fix - mad cultists' heal seems to me to be a bit too powerful - big range, big HP. Especially when they're not alone, it's a pain. (SQ1 extreme, the Halls of God king - these are practically show-stoppers, the difficulty jump compared to earlier levels is just enormous. 3 levels of grinding made no difference at all.

[coyot]

Again on the subject of mad cultists - maybe the solution would be to make them heal only other unit types - that is, they would not heal themselves or other cultists.

Also I'm not sure how the formula is calculated - in battle preview, I see cultist level 14 doing 2280 heal, although the local_heal skill says 100 base and 20 levelup, so according to that, level 14 cultist should heal 380 (or 360 if levelup is applied (level-1) times).

Just to give the overall picture - 3 cultists level 14 have something like 20k HP each - and a combined healing power of almost 1000 HP per second.

[Anthony]

So I would say that Zelemir's HP on Normal should be at least 600k on Normal and some 800k on advanced, in order to force the player to deal with the creeps as well, not just pwn Zelemir.

Quick question on this one: which Zelemir are you talking about? The first one, or the one right before Eztli? It does look like both of them could be bumped up in HP quite a bit. Either way, I've bumped up both Zelemir's and Eztli, so that their HP are now:

Zelemir 1: 500k, 900k, 2.6M
Zelemir 2: 780k, 1.7M, 6.3M
Eztli: 950k, 2.2M, 7.0M

Haven't tried them out much yet (and not committed yet in the test build), but those seem to flow better in terms of HP totals level by level.

[coyot]

I was talking about the first one, "Zelemir appears".

I'm not sure if Eztli needs a boost and how big one - I haven't reached him yet in NG with the minimal squad (grinding up to level 40 right now, and waiting to see how will you tweak the critical/bleed weapons and mad cultist healing. The latter is so far a showstopper on the Hand level)

[Anthony]

I probably just need to tone down the cultist healing. I don't think we can set them up to not self-target (Lars, correct if wrong), but they're likely OP regardless.