Author Topic: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees  (Read 47384 times)

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Offline Virisin

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Bear with me here, this might be quite long and I'm not entirely sure how coherent it will be yet. I am going to try to outline what I think 4dimensions should be heading towards, that should not require huge change like we sometimes talk about, but that could basically be done with three fairly significant alterations to three of our existing features and one new feature. People need to remember here, and really think about this the whole way through: none of these changes will make things harder for you. If anything, the goal is to make things easier but more enjoyable, and it would all require reasonable testing to make sure it worked well, otherwise it wouldn't be implemented. You should keep an open mind while reading and decide if you think the idea's would actually make things a little more interesting for you.

Now, the four features I would like to see change are GM, the movement/mana system and the skills/spells system, and a new weapon/elemental proficiencies system.

First of all, if the GM flag was removed so that you didn't ever get to keep all tier 2 skills/spells in the game, and instead kept your last 8 remorts tier 1-4 skills/spells. This would open new dynamics for different styles of play, Thief/Warrior, Hunter/Priest, Gypsy/Esper - this is actually how it was on the old code, except you kept your last 4 remorts, except without tiers that meant 4 classes. This would probably actually make players stronger, because they would now be able to keep 2 tier 4's at a time if they liked. However, if they thought 1 tier 4 class was enough, they could go Thief tier 4, Warrior tier 2, Hunter tier 2, and now they would be a mixture of 3 classes, but still with one solid tier 4 behind them.

Secondly, if the movement/mana system was altered to be more similar to a type of 'action points' system that most big games use. We already use stamina instead of movement for a lot of things, and it's actually a much better stat. It discourages spamming because it effectively 'heats up' very fast, but it also 'cools down' very fast too. It is kind of like action points, limiting the amount of things you can do in x amount of time. This is different to movement which is just a large total, which only limits the total amount of things you can do over a very large time, but is essentially so out of scale it is a pool by which to sip through straws on.

Also, all movement really does in 4d is stop newbies from being able to explore and run around. Their 'pool' of movement is only a puddle, and it runs out fast and takes a long time to restore. Unlike stamina which is fairly similar for every player, only newbies are affected by this small 'pool'. Now, imagine if we had a similar, stamina version of mana, and lost mana too. Now we would have two sets of 'action points' that were basically 'Stamina' and 'Mana', we would have discouraged spamming both skills and spells by making them both very 'heat sensitive' features basically.

If someone wants to cast a spell in battle, they have to realize it might eat up a significant amount of their Mana, and they need to choose which spells to cast, and choose them wisely. On top of that, if you could determine roughly how much Stamina or Mana to use, ie, by charging your spell, or putting effort into your kick, you could actually potentially do more or less damage with a selected skill in battle. All this would be balanced so even if you only used 2 skills in a fight, you would still kill a mob at the same speed (hopefully even faster) in this system as you would currently. This would hopefully mean that instead of typing behead;behead;behead;behead;behead;behead 15 times in one fight, you only need to behead a mob once, or heart squeeze a mob once, or demonshreak a mob once, or encircle a mob once, (and so you should) and the fight would be largely over. Your stamina or mana would restore quickly, maybe 10 seconds of not using any skills or spells or speedwalking.

The third change would be to the skills system, to try and make some basic skill-trees. e.g. every class actually has a 'style' and roughly two tree's of skills inside it. If you only had enough practice sessions to learn one of the trees inside a class, or half of both trees, then you could really add even more variety to the classes, as well as beefing up each individual tree, because if you can only learn 'behead' but can't learn 'brace' then you can make behead do much more damage and brace block much more damage. This would work very well with the 'remember 8 remorts' thing spoken about above. If you want to do Thief twice, and remember 8 remorts of Thief, you would be able to learn BOTH of the skill trees every class has. And be a truely specialized class.

I will now give a brief idea of how the skill trees might look:

Imagine that the core skills of each class are as follows,

Mage: heart squeeze, inferno, meteor shower (offensive individual, offensive area)
Hunter: behead, bladedance
Thief: backstab, focus, blackjack
Gypsy: slit, phase, sleep
Ranger: encircle, dodge, hamstring
Esper: phase, slowness, corrupt armor (evasive, debuffs)
Warrior: brace, parry
Priest: sanctuary, bless, armor, heal (buffs, heals)

You can almost see they range from very OFFENSIVE at the top to very DEFENSIVE at the bottom.

Mage being either an offensive towards an individual type class, by using a key spell like heart squeeze, or being an offensive towards an area type class, by using inferno and meteor shower.

Hunters can only behead once per fight, but bladedance makes that behead seriously strong. That shit will kill most of the time.

Thieves get backstab a massive opener, and focus to increase the power of backstab, as well as blackjack which can make backstab a one-hit-kill.

Slit would deal ongoing damage, phase would let you avoid more hits and increase the frequency of yours. Sleep puts them under, even in battle so a Gypsy could slit and sleep as a potential to do some damage - though it wouldn't be the fastest.

Encircle for Rangers would be like a less powerful backstab, used in battle. Dodge would make Rangers super hard to hit, and hamstring would cripple the opponent.

Warriors would get brace, maybe reducing up to 60% of the incoming damage, as well as parry, blocking a huge amount of blows.

Priests would get lots of buff type spells, like sanctuary, bless and armor, to make them absorb heavy damage feeling almost nothing. They could also learn heals, letting them heal up during fights.

All other skills would just be prereqs to these main skills, or a lot of them in a pool that all classes can learn, like mount, riding, firearms, etc. I imagine cleave would be a pre-requisite for behead, that warriors could learn too. Sneak would be something many classes could learn, but it would be especially good for increasing the damage of backstab.

Fourthly, and finally: weapon and elemental proficiencies, separate to the skill trees are these proficiencies in every type of weapon: shortsword, axe, warhammer, etc, as well as all of our elemental types, fire, water, air, etc. These are not things you need to worry about learning with practice sessions, these are things you get better at through use. They are zero-sum equations, eg, any gains in one thing result in losses in other things. If you spend all your time using fire, you will not be able to get very good at air, or water. Similarly, if you use longswords most, your other weapon masteries will face depletion. These would all be on scales of 1-100.

This is all I can think of for now.. Have a read, have a think, have a post.

« Last Edit: September 17, 2011, 11:48:48 pm by Virisin »

Offline Virisin

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2011, 11:55:49 pm »
All of this should be with the goal of having it so if you're in a fight with a mob of your same level, you should be able to kill it in 10-20 seconds without doing anything other in battle than typing 'kill dragon'. If you want to fight something above your level, you can start using up action points in fight, either consistently casting heal until the fight is over, or making a one-off heart squeeze that requires all your action points, but ends it immediately.

In the end, it should actually be easier to gain experience and kill mobs.

Offline Molly

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #2 on: September 18, 2011, 04:15:51 am »
Thanks Virisin, for taking this initiative. :)

We definitely need to set down our future goals, and I think the four features that Viri mention pretty much sums up what mostly needs working on.
In an ideal world, we'd just define the goal, and then make sure that every small change in the future is consistent with that goal. But it isn't that easy.

Naturally different people will have different ideas about what those goals should be. Debate is always good  so it will be encouraged. Usually some good ideas come out of the debate itself.

However, we don't want to waste the time explaining the mechanics of every proposed idea. Some changes won't work as well as intended and will have to be reversed or tweaked. Some ideas are just not feasible, and would upset too many other parts of the system. Others may need to much work to be worth the effort, for instance extensive OLC work. Yet others might upset the balance of the game.
If we want people to spend their spare time working for 4D, we must respect that their time is best used doing what they are good at.
Coders should spend their time coding and Builders should spend their time building. Don't expect them to explain in detail why a certain feature cannot be implemented.
If they say that something cannot be done, you'll just have to take their word for it.

And at some point or other someone will have to make the decisions. There is no way we can please everyone, but at least everyone will have a chance to have their say. So let's discuss the future of 4D with open minds.
However, debating shouldn't stop us from acting. We need some changes, and we need them now – not in two years time. So while we are debating the future, let's also act now.

And please don't make this a discussion just about GM or no GM, that's what this thread is for:
http://4dimensions.org/forum/?topic=723.msg4869;topicseen

Offline Jaros

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #3 on: September 19, 2011, 12:14:39 am »
Alright this is pretty amateur still so we were going to let the thread get going before posting it, but no one's saying anything so here it is: a possible stepping stone to skill trees.

We've tried to make use of skills already in the game wherever possible but pretty much all of them would have to be adjusted to be as powerful as the next in one way or another.  For example, Thieves  may seem hard done by until until you imagine SNEAK adding a sizable bonus to opening attacks, BLACKJACK being usable in battle, BACKSTAB halving a big foe's HP at least, and FOCUS maybe doubling BACKSTAB's chance of instakill.  In this way, a perfectly specialized THIEF is suddenly a class that concentrates on sneaking into a boss mob's room undetected, backstabbing it down to 50%HP or so and then blackjacking it on its ass and sneaking away again to recover some stamina.  Or alternatively, sneaking in, blackjacking, focussing and then killing it with one opening backstab.

Likewise a Ranger's SNARE would also slow down the opponent considerably and increase the effectiveness of ENCIRCLE, while HAMSTRING would massively reduce the damage an opponent could dish out and DODGE would make you ridiculously hard to hit.

These would be the unique, specialist skills of each class.  Each class would only get a handful and to get all of them the thinking is that you would need to have 8 remorts in that one class.  They're designed to make each class feel unique.

We haven't really attempted spells yet.. that's a whole nother kettle to deal with.  :-\

Stay tuned for the actual tree in the next post.  :D
« Last Edit: September 19, 2011, 12:36:36 am by Jaros »

Offline Jaros

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #4 on: September 19, 2011, 12:33:09 am »
    BRANCH 1     BRANCH 2

Hunter

T1           Melee
T2  Cleave        Adv. Melee
T3                   Master Melee
T4  Behead       Bladedance

Thief

T1  Blackjack    Sneak
T2  BJ II
T3                   Focus
T4  Backstab     Focus II

Gypsy

T1       Hyperactivity
T2       Midas Touch
T3  MT II           Phase
T4  Slit             Phase II

Ranger

T1  Hamstring    Snare
T2  Ham II
T3                    Dodge
T4  Encircle        Dodge II

Warrior

T1       Martial Arts
T2  Bash            Parry
T3                    Fortify
T4  Grapple        Brace

So, basically it's not so much a tree as it is two branches.  Some skills are deliberately aligned in the middle because you learn them before choosing which direction to go in at tier 2/3.  Like I said, it's amateur but that's essentially what we're aiming for.  The one I'm most worried about is GRAPPLE.  It fits well with the Warrior's defensive, BRACED style, but how to make it worth investing in in its own right?

The other thing is, if you chose a branch like Hunter's MELEE, CLEAVE, gap, BEHEAD, you wouldn't get a unique option to learn at tier 3 but you could still invest in other skills from the pool available to everyone.  (Or maybe you could invest in some extra STR to boost your damage or something.. but that's for a later post.)

Offline Virisin

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #5 on: September 19, 2011, 02:15:36 am »
Grapple would be really good in an action points system where grappling a mob out of the room is a great way of doing significant damage and also giving yourself 2 seconds of stamina recovery - which should be a lot, 20-30% stamina recovered. That's enough for another kick potentially.

Offline Jaros

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #6 on: September 19, 2011, 02:48:10 am »
Cool.

This is actually not a new system that needs extensive coding as far as I can tell, it's just a reorganization of what we have now.

We have prerequisites.

We have tiers.

We have the skills.  They just need adjustments.

What we do need are Viri's action points style of stamina and mana, and I've been told that's not actually hard as long as no one's trying to rewrite the movement code.  So we could leave movement in place for now and just sideline it with stamina and 'sta-mana.'  (get it?  i wrote mana as if it worked more like stamina  :D)

Offline Molly

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #7 on: September 19, 2011, 03:04:08 am »
What we do need are Viri's action points style of stamina and mana, and I've been told that's not actually hard as long as no one's trying to rewrite the movement code.  So we could leave movement in place for now and just sideline it with stamina and 'sta-mana.'  (get it?  i wrote mana as if it worked more like stamina  :D)

From what I heard someone is trying to rewrite the movement code, and it's proved to be very hard because the existing code is so convoluted and buggy.

So sidelining movement for now is probably a good idea.
But maybe in the meantime we could give newbies a bit more movepoints to start out with, it seems like an easy fix?

Offline Prometheus

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #8 on: September 19, 2011, 09:50:04 am »
I'd thought I already increased the amount of basic movement newbies get. I can give them more. This movement is at character creation since the level up code applies to all though I guess it could be possible to check for t1 lvl 1 to 50 and give them a larger movement / stamina gain.

I can take a look and make sure.

Prometheus
« Last Edit: September 19, 2011, 09:54:25 am by Prometheus »

Offline Jaros

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #9 on: September 19, 2011, 08:22:42 pm »
Give them heaps.  It shouldn't even be an issue for them.

Offline Jaros

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #10 on: October 03, 2011, 05:34:51 am »
Here are some actually balanced skill suggestions, designed to work with action points.

Melee

Everyone gets 300sta(mina) and it regens at 10sta/sec

At tier 4: 100sta corresponds to a skill multiplier of x5, or five extra hits.
At tier 3: 150sta ....
At tier 2: 200sta ....

These are all written as tier 4, high-end skills, but can easily be converted.

Skill                               Cost                               Effect                                                     Type                                   Class

Bladedance                20sta/sec                  x2 damage on all hits                       Buff                              Hunter

Behead                     200sta                       x10multi                                        Attack                          Hunter


Agility                       20sta/sec                  2 for 1 hits                                    Buff                              Thief

Backstab                   200sta                      x10multi opening                             Attack                          Thief

Blackjack                   70sta                        7sec sleep & -70sta                        Debuff                          Thief
                                                     (works in battle but ends fighting)

Phase                       16sta/sec                  40% chance of dodge+hit                 Buff                              Gypsy

Slit                           100sta                      x0.5multi every sec for 10sec            Attack                          Gypsy

Midas Touch               60sta                       +30% stamina cost                         Debuff                           Gypsy


Dodge                       10sta/sec                  50% chance of dodge                      Buff                              Ranger

Encircle                     50sta                        multi = sta / opponent_sta x 2          Attack                           Ranger

Hamstring                  50sta                        -5sta/sec                                      Debuff                           Ranger


Brace                        10sta/sec                  x0.5 damage taken                          Buff                              Warrior

Grapple                      50sta                        thrown from room                           Debuff                           Warrior
                                                         opp.sta = x(opp.con / your.str)
                                                                                  ^^^ approx. 2/3
                                                                      

The numbers should be fairly consistent but I haven't really checked them too carefully and the debuff costs are pretty much educated guesses.

Note the trend from high cost intensity at the top to low cost sustainable at the bottom, IE Rangers and Warriors win by weathering the storm and outlasting their opponent; Hunters and Thieves are in it for the quick kill and recovery time.

One major issue is HP.  These skills are all approximately worth the same in terms of damage and such, which means fighters have an advantage with their significantly more HP and dambonus.  That could be remedied by giving rogues more base stamina, more stamina regen, or more base sta-mana.  I quite like the idea of rogues having more sta-mana, which would make them more generalist and give them a larger arsenal to compete with fighters' HP and damage advantages, both in PK and against mobs.

Feedbackfeedbackfeedbackfeedback
« Last Edit: October 03, 2011, 05:46:41 am by Jaros »

Offline Virisin

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #11 on: October 03, 2011, 05:57:09 am »
That looks really good on first look.

Offline Tor

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #12 on: October 04, 2011, 09:12:54 am »
Me:   Tier 4, level 50, GM, Priest
   Speed 344
   Hit Points 2490

Mob:   Tier 4, level 50, Caster
   Faster than a speeding bullet
   Hit Points in the tens of thousands

I think this mob matches my tier and level. One of the easier tier 4, level 50 mobs I know of, so I definitely wouldn't think it was fighting above my level.

The mob was confused, blinded and weakened at the beginning of the fight. So it was disadvantaged, had those spells missed, the fight would have been longer.

All of its attacks missed me.

All of my auto attacks missed the mob.

Alternating different attack spells; Fireball, Acid Arrow, Chill Touch, Cone of Cold, Shocking Grasp and Lightning bolt, it took 18 spells to defeat the mob. All of the attack spells were trained to 98%. One heal was used to see how it affected the timing of the mobs attacks. With the heal the mob got 6 attacks from the last attack I made before the heal to the one cast immediately after. The mob averaged 3 attacks to my 1.

I cast 17 attack spells in total, (after confusion, blindness and weaken), and included a pause to see what happened with the auto attacks. One spell powered up, but never got a report on its damage or missing, although my mana reduced, all of the other spells hit.

My point is, with the changes being talked about, as I understand them, I would have ran out of stamina way before I was able to end this fight with a mob of the same tier and level. I'd have been stuck, pummeled mercilessly, not able to even flee.



Offline Virisin

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #13 on: October 04, 2011, 04:45:57 pm »
It is very easy to alter mob strength and other attributes on a global scale. A change like this would go through quite rigorous testing in a test port before ever being implemented to the game port to make sure things weren't just made immediately harder by the change. Making things harder is definitely not what we want.

Offline Jaros

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Re: Ramblings on a Future without GM, with Action Points and Skill Trees
« Reply #14 on: October 04, 2011, 07:28:00 pm »
Thanks Tor, you make a good point.

I would have ran out of stamina way before I was able to end this fight with a mob of the same tier and level. I'd have been stuck, pummeled mercilessly, not able to even flee.

Let's think about that though.  You can't just look at the stamina costs and think, well I'm going to run out and be totally vulnerable.  Think about what that stamina would be giving you first.

You're a priest, which would basically be the defensive, warrior type; not able to kill something as fast as a mage but able to last comfortably in battle almost indefinitely.  Notice that instead of costly, high-damage skills, I've given rangers and warriors much cheaper skills that will see their stamina lasting a lot longer and give them an advantage the longer a fight goes on.  Also notice that even the skills you can't use as frequently as you would now, all have much more significant effects, and the same would be true of spells.  So your defensive spells would work similarly to brace, which cuts all damage in half.

The point is that in return for limiting how many skills/spells you can use in a short period, this would make those same skills/spells worth a lot more to you.  So I think it's safe to say that even if you as a priest managed to use up your stamina/mana against a similar strength mob, you would be a long way from getting pummeled mercilessly.

It is interesting that you didn't land a single regular hit though.  What's your hitroll?  I think you should definitely be able to rely on auto-attacks more than you do now if we get action points.