Suggestions for the coming release Options

[lroumen]

i am still busy with the cleric run. I only just got to the level where the new spells are introduced. Just a bit more experience with the before i can give some feedback on them.

for thieves, ideas yet unmentioned.
I would like it if detect illusions becomes passieve after 100%,such that if you have 120% you do 20% passive detect illusions.
pick pockets is a flavour skill. it could be nice to give the possibility to steal quest items via alternative paths to resolve quests

[SparrowJacek]

i am still busy with the cleric run. I only just got to the level where the new spells are introduced. Just a bit more experience with the before i can give some feedback on them.

Good luck with that! I hope that at least some changes introduced in v6.6 BETA will enhance your gameplay and add new ideas for some battles.

I would like it if detect illusions becomes passieve after 100%,such that if you have 120% you do 20% passive detect illusions

This is an amazing idea! I will try to implement it when I have some time, to see if it's possible without too many potential errors.

[lappen]

hey guys i have a question.

is it possible to introduce the robe of eloquenz to the game ?

perhaps u will do that in the future, but i want to try it on my own.

any advice how to do it on my own ?

i guess i need to have the item file and so on

[critto]

Hi.

The robe and other stuffs (items and encounters) from The Four are already a part of the core IA experience now, actually. Have been for a while. But the items were slightly nerfed and re-balanced so it might not be what you expect.

[ed boy]

I think the only remaining class that's not been discussed that could do with a buff is Monk.

With IA having such a focus on powerful equipment and upgrading characters, the class whose identity is built around not needing equipment gets kind of left out. The few items that monks can use all feel quite samey, so making monks feel distinct is a problem. Once a monk has been built, they don't really have much they can do in combat besides go to an enemy and punch them repeatedly.

Some ideas I have for making them feel unique:

Adding damage types
IA has a theme of different enemies being weak to different types of damage (piercing/slashing/crushing). A monk's fist attack always does crushing, which means that against enemies that resist crushing, they lose a lot of effectiveness. If monks had the ability to swap damage types, then this would avoid situations where they're a dead weight.

Adding stances
The one major monk character that the players interact with in Balthazar, who has a unique fight - every round or two, he will announce a stance that he's changing to, then get a short term buff. This is something that we can also do for the player - give them difference stances that they can move between. This can also be tied into the damage types idea above - each stance can have an appropriate damage type, and stances can be moved between to change damage types.

As players level up, their stances can become more powerful, or they may be able to gain more stances. I like the idea of having the stance buffs only being active for a short period of time, encouraging the player to move between stances instead of sticking with the same one for a long time. This can probably be best implemented by having each stance generate a weapon that the monk equips that disappears after two or three rounds. This way, the auto-pause on weapon unusable can be an easy prompt for the user to know when to switch.

Some examples stances:

• Cheetah Stance - Increase movement speed while active. Inflict piercing damage.
• Rhino Stance - On activation, knock back nearby enemies. Immunity to slow.
• Pacifism Stance - On activation, heal a lot of hit points. Reduce damage output while active.
• Flame Stance - On activation, cast sunfire. Increase fire resistance and add fire damage to attacks.
• Spellbreaker Stance - On activation, dispel self. Increase magic resistance and magic damage resistance. Attacks count as mundane.

Innate buffs
Instead of giving monk a series of item upgrades, they can instead craft special potions that will give them permanent buffs. These would require rare items that are obtained throughout the game. They would have to be not very powerful individually, but once a lot of them are collected they provide a substantial boost to the player. They can also be set up to give the player choices of what buffs to get (potentially restricting on things like alignment) to add some variation between different monk builds.

As an example, beating the Troll Mound or TorGal could drop a new item "Potent Troll Blood". Upon taking this to an alchemist character, the character is given the choice of potions to craft - One gives slow regeneration, another gives a constitution boost, a third may give a hitpoint boost or a saving throw boost.

HLAs
Instead of giving the monk the same HLAs as the other warriors, I would want to give them most passive HLAs, and give them access to more powerful stances via HLA. HLA exclusivity (similar to how the planetar spells are exclusive) would give the player the ability to choose different monk paths to specialize in.

For example, instead of giving monks access to Hardiness HLA, I would want to give them access to a HLA that provides 8% damage resistance, but can only be taken 5 times. This way, the monk will end up with permanent hardiness, but it will come at a very high HLA cost and come a lot later in the game. This will help them have a distinct feel while playing, as well as prevent too much competition with stance swapping for using the monk's actions.

This post has been edited by ed boy: Apr 29 2023, 11:54 AM

[SparrowJacek]

Well... I can't agree with your statement, that Monks need a buff, to be honest. At the moment this is the easiest class to play(we have no data about Monk kits in IA, but they are probably better than pure class) with very powerful abilities, and VERY limited amount of gold needed for his upgrades (only an amulet and items +2, nothing more is needed).

That's true, I remember playing a Monk in v6.2, but you are 100% right that playing a Monk is all about ordering him to pound another enemy, there's little strategic depth in that and you proposed some great ideas of addressing that however to do so we'd probably need to nerf Monks a bit to make those items/abilities useful enough, so that players do pick them, without making Monks too powerful.

Also just some notes:

Rhino Stance - On activation, knock back nearby enemies. Immunity to slow

From what I remember, Monks are immune to slow anyway

As an example, beating the Troll Mound or TorGal could drop a new item "Potent Troll Blood".

Not sure, but I think we already have some blood dropping there and it's used for Barbarian new armor improvement.

Thank you for those ideas, I will write them down and use them to make changes to Monks, but that will probably happen when we sit down and properly raise difficulty for Balthazar fight. Right now the most important thing is to work on v7, then to apply some changes to Clerics based on input from players and then balance some over/underpowered kits/classes, Monks are currently playable and useful.

EDIT
Bards are still very weak

This post has been edited by SparrowJacek: Apr 29 2023, 12:41 PM

[ed boy]

Are monks that good in IA? My experience with them is mostly from vanilla or SCS, where they were definitely an underpowered class - they are weak at the start of the game, lag behind in the middle, and gain power spikes in the late game, but even with the spikes I found that they lagged behind other classes.

Although they can use weapons, they lack the proficiencies to use them as effectively as one of the other warrior classes. The fists get APR bonuses, but as the monk does not get APR from proficiency, the fist does not overtake a fighter's APR until level 15, and the lead peaks at level 18 when they have 1 APR more than an equivalent level fighter (4 APR vs 3 APR). However, when you consider that the monk cannot be hasted, and the party will have access to IH by level 15, the monk is going to stay behind a fighter with Haste/IH.

The monk fists are considered magical weapons, but the levels of the fists increases slowly, at a rate lower than the magic items a party would be able to obtain. As IA has several enemies that require enchantment level to hit, the monk will be lagging behind party fighters here, being unable to hurt Gem/Coin golems until level 15, and being unable to hurt skeleton grandmasters until level 25. A monk's fists do an average of 6.5 damage from levels 9-14, and an average of 11.5 damage from level 15 onwards (plus STR bonus). The monk misses out on proficiency bonus, (which would add 5 damage), meaning the monk has damage output similar to a two-handed sword.

Defensively, a monk has worse AC than a fighter at levels when the AC matters, and worse AC at levels when the AC does not matter. They do have a decent saving throw bonus, and the magic resistance bonus is nice, though it hits quite late. The immunities are good in relevant fights, but situational. These combine to mean that the monk is weaker against physical enemies and stronger against magical enemies.

Item-wise, the monk has two specific IA items (Grandmaster of Flowers and Gauntlets of Devastating). The Grandmaster of Flowers is a very nice defensive item, but it comes quite late (After the sewer illithids). The Gauntlets of Devastating looks has a large bonus to THAC0/damage, but because of damage rounding it effectively only adds 2 damage (though the THAC0 portion is rather nice). Given that the gauntlets have to do the work of both gauntlets and weapon, these feel a bit below par.

[SparrowJacek]

Okay, now I can see the problem clearly. You weren't aware that IA v6.2 improved Monks significantly. For starters, they get level and thac0 progression of a Fighter, do they get 0 thac0 at some point. Their progression has been adjusted so they should get their +3/4 enchantment around the time you really start facing enemies requiring it. At lvl 11 they get an UNDISPELABLE Improved Haste (and next usages at later levels). At higher levels they get Diamond Body which improves their physical resistances, gives them some protections and Regen that is also doubled by their IH ability. So yeah, they're pretty good although a bit vulnerable at the beginning and I highly recommend trying them out, especially Rasaad who has his special item, which either is slightly upgraded in v6.6 or will be in v7.

Gauntlets of Devastating looks has a large bonus to THAC0/damage, but because of damage rounding it effectively only adds 2 damage

Only +2? What do you mean by that? And this upgrade is actually not needed, the original version of the artifact is enough, so you only need to upgrade the amulet to see a nice result.

[ed boy]

Okay, now I can see the problem clearly. You weren't aware that IA v6.2 improved Monks significantly.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I don't see these changes listed in the documentation, they should probably be added there (or made more visible if they're already there).

Gauntlets of Devastating looks has a large bonus to THAC0/damage, but because of damage rounding it effectively only adds 2 damage

Only +2? What do you mean by that? And this upgrade is actually not needed, the original version of the artifact is enough, so you only need to upgrade the amulet to see a nice result.

If attacking an enemy with 75% crushing damage resistance (eg gem golem), the +6 damage will either add 1 or 2 damage to each hit (depending on what the rest of the damage roll is).

[critto]

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I don't see these changes listed in the documentation, they should probably be added there (or made more visible if they're already there).

That's not really true :-) There's a section of the readme located at "Content -> Kits". It lists all new kits and the existing ones, modified by IA. Monks are in there as well.

[ed boy]

Ah, so it is - I just have terrible reading comprehension. They looks plenty strong in the new version.

[pekkae]

[/list]Another potential way to give a thief a bonus that would make them feel unique would be by reworking the poison mechanic - give them abilities that function like the ghoul touch line of spells that on hit apply a saveless penalty to the enemy. Making them saveless would make them a very strong ability, but given the weakness of the rest of the thief it can probably be done in a balanced way. it would also help the thief by giving it a unique attack type that feels very different to the other classes. Some potential examples:

• Spellpiercer poison - On hit, dispel the enemy at a level bonus (similar to the inquisitor)
• Spellplague poison - On hit, give the enemy a penalty of increased casting time on their spells
• Dragonbane poison - On hit, prevent an enemy dragon from using Dragon's Breath or Dragon Fear (with similar poisons for other enemy types)
• Lethargy poison - On hit, slow the enemy
• Shieldshatter poison - On hit, give the enemy a penalty to AC
• Lifesteal poison - On hit, give the enemy a fireshield-like ability that will heal attackers instead of damaging them

So many great ideas for thieves! I'm looking much forward to trying these out.

I have one additional suggestion for this.

If Assassin is one hit wonder, perhaps the abilities whether backstabbing / poison could be developed even further a little bit. So this Assasin's special abilities would offer a wide range of unique devastating effects.

Would include this types of attacks as well:

- Lowers physcal resistance
- Disables PFMW / spell protections
- Lowers fire/lightning/cold/acid resistance
- Lowers magic resistance
- Lowers resistance to magic damage
- Makes enemy unable to use special abilities (50% failure rate or something like that)

The idea would be to use these types of sneaky stelath attacks to turn the tide of a battle / get over a difficult situation.

[SparrowJacek]

These are all very nice ideas that we might explore, if Assassins turn out to be too weak. The problem with this kit is, that Assassins are mainly focused on melee combat, so we need to be creative with their abilities here, since IA is already heavily focused and biased towards melee.

- Disables PFMW / spell protections

PFMW and other similar spells are a huge part of the balance, so I wouldn't like to touch them, and I have only one single enemy in mind that might have such ability in the future. Affecting other spell protections might be an interesting alternative to Breach/RM though.

- Lowers fire/lightning/cold/acid resistance

Assassins are focused on physical and poison damage, so it wouldn't synergize with such abilities. But some other characters/kits might get such abilities (well, technically some Divine spells in v6.6_BETA already do that, though with 0 duration)

- Lowers magic resistance
- Lowers resistance to magic damage

Similar to the previous one. I have not consulted it with Critto yet, but I have an idea to completely rework Wizard Slayer, which is the weirdest kit in the game and not very useful, especially in IA. I'd like to turn his Miscast Magic into something that would reduce enemy Magic Resistance, so that this kit would be relatively weak on its own, however it would synergize well with all magic casters.

[SparrowJacek]

Good news, guys! Some time ago I wrote:

I struggled with those limitations that you pointed for years, trying to balance Thieves around them. But there's not much that we can do, which leads me to the biggest and probably the most controversial change, which sadly reduces quality of life a bit... Reworked Stealth will be a separate ability, that tries to mimic original Stealth in many ways, but can do much more. Stealth button will probably become useless (clicking the button won't have any effect) but will still be greyed out when you can't use Stealth.

With some help from an experienced UI modder, I managed to get some pretty nice results and most probably clicking Stealth button will trigger our improved Stealth ability, so players won't have to search for that skill in Special Abilities tab, when we introduce rebalanced Thief class

[lappen]

its so nice that you guys still work on the mod

i dont know how much hours u invested in this but i would spend little money for ur effort

[critto]

Thanks for the kind words and for the offer, lappen, but it is truly not necessary. If we had only spent enough time on it, the v7 would've been out a long time ago! So I'm afraid I have not been as diligent and committed to the cause these last few years as you would believe :-)

[pekkae]

An idea for a new quest.

The player can follow demogorgon to it's own plane, the 88th layer of Abyss, after banishing it from the prime material plane to end it's threat forever and have an absolute blast defeating armies of monsters and demons. Defeating Demogorgons servants in Ungorth Reddik, the hezrous, sea trolls, icythoids and aboleths/skum. A final battle in Abyss, the demogorgons palace.

(optional, for crews surpassing 10Mexp points).

[critto]

Interesting but would probably require a ton of new graphics that we aren't really equipped to produce. Unless something relevant be borrowed from PST:EE.

[pekkae]

Interesting but would probably require a ton of new graphics that we aren't really equipped to produce. Unless something relevant be borrowed from PST:EE.

Couldn't the graphic be borrowed from EE content?

Like the final dungeon of Rasaad's quest in ToB? No-one ever playes through it, at least I don't think, so it should be fresh for almost all players. And it even a little bit looks like the part.

This post has been edited by pekkae: Jul 16 2023, 02:38 PM

[critto]

Well, it depends. I'm not familiar with any of the lore you speak of. We'd need to research it to have a better understanding of the area, the enemies and so on. I'm generally against the idea of using any random stuff even if it barely fits the concept.