Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Giving up combat power, for out of combat power.
anemo
Member RarePosts: 1,903
Is it viable to give up combat power, or even shifting combat power to gain other advantages?
An example of giving up combat power. You lose a utility(gear slot, or even a combat feature) to gain an out of combat ability. For instance the most directly balancable feature would be something like a hacking ability which can be used to open/close parts of a dungeon: leading to the ability to skip some encounters, open up different ones, or get access to some loot you normally wouldn't have. There are also more severe options like making it so that healing can not happen while in combat, and to train down "the healers path" you're going to have to take on some oaths(IE: limiting some NPCs you can damage) or spend limited training points.
An example of shifting power would be locking yourself out of a part of your combat skill tree to take on a crafting profession(for instance the rogue would give up the ability to use their stuns/slows). Meaning you can make gear more powerful than default gear(or amp up raid gear for yourself), or make ammo'ed(limited use) items that let you mimic another classes abilities once or twice in a raid.
An example of giving up combat power. You lose a utility(gear slot, or even a combat feature) to gain an out of combat ability. For instance the most directly balancable feature would be something like a hacking ability which can be used to open/close parts of a dungeon: leading to the ability to skip some encounters, open up different ones, or get access to some loot you normally wouldn't have. There are also more severe options like making it so that healing can not happen while in combat, and to train down "the healers path" you're going to have to take on some oaths(IE: limiting some NPCs you can damage) or spend limited training points.
An example of shifting power would be locking yourself out of a part of your combat skill tree to take on a crafting profession(for instance the rogue would give up the ability to use their stuns/slows). Meaning you can make gear more powerful than default gear(or amp up raid gear for yourself), or make ammo'ed(limited use) items that let you mimic another classes abilities once or twice in a raid.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Comments
In Anarchy Online, if you wanted to craft stuff, you had to put points into that, which left less for combat attributes.
In Uncharted Waters Online, some classes are light on or completely lacking in combat skills. You can still use combat skills not relevant to your current class, but they won't level as fast and have a lower skill cap. It makes a difference that the game is not primarily about combat, however.
In Tree of Savior, certain classes such as Pardoner and Alchemist are seriously lacking in combat skills in order to make some crafting skills available. If you want to get to third circle in either of those classes, you're going to be weaker in combat for a long time.
Im tired of characters that are sword wielding, master chef, expert miner, able to sow the finest robes, and PR with NPCs for trading purposes...
Have abundant skill trees that have sub-requirements in other skill trees.. then make some incompatible.. You cant go down the druid tree if youve taken destruction magic for example (kinda like oaths you mentioned)
Then make Races relevant again... a mouse, a human, a plant being, a giant, etc should not all be able to have the same skills.. let it be combat or gathering/crafting.
All this with acquirable "limited" skill points and not as many resets as you want
Restricting to one character per account doesn't help either. They'll just make alternate accounts.
The only way to prevent that is to tie your noncombat skills seamlessly into the same gameplay sessions as the combat skills. Lockpicking and trap-disarming being some of the most obvious methods. At that point, however, the game becomes a balancing nightmare in terms of balancing which skills are desireable (to the point where almost every game that has lock picking or trap disarming ends up with a meta where no one bothers with those skills) or suddenly needing to balance content on two separate fronts due to weird "let your guild carry you through the dungeon while you be boring dead weight" cases such as putting a special forge for the blacksmith at the end of a hard dungeon cases or "need to have this crafting skill while you kill these tough mobs in order to gather ingredients" situations, with the payoff generally not being worth it because crafting is still so easy that it doesn't create much player interdependency anyways (or hypothetically so hard that it becomes unused content cause most players won't partake in it, though I've never seen that happen) so I can understand why most developers stopped bothering.
@Tiamat64
So are against shifting power. For instance the rogue giving up their stun/slow to craft/improve gear is essentially choosing to give up their stun/slow for some higher base stats, which means they can choose to be tankier or burstier.
In the ones that are a truely giving up combat power, if you're playing a World of Everclone game which limits the number of people who can enter the raid. The raid as a whole is still taking the trade off, with the intention of it being similar to how in CoD/FPSers you can choose to take more grenades or an AED(resurrection device).
I guess there is also the argument that if it's overplayed it's going to come down to stockpiling it all onto one character. Especially since in traditional RPGs everything stacks multiplicatively at some point or another, with that high willpower/strength stat only ever being good for more damage rather than some types of support skills. Or at least players being greedy when it comes to their numbers or build (depending on who you ask rightfully or wrongfully so).
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
In Planetside 1, there was also the ability to give up combat power for other powers. For instance, unlike Planetshit 2, in PS1 the only way to get inside of an enemy building was to hack the doors. Then, in order to start capturing the building, you had to hack the computer core and keep it hacked for a certain period of time. In order to use a hacking tool, though, you had to sacrifice skill points that could potentially be put into armor or weapons. Advanced hacking, which let you gain access to things much more quickly, was a very costly skill. The same with armor repair and health packs, they both had to be skilled into to be used effectively, therefore a medic or engineer would have reduced combat ability.
In your standard MMO, no. For the simple reason that every single dungeon is a tank and spank. Anything that lowers your ability in your designated role (DPS, Tank, or Healer) is bad.
If a game was to offer real advantages in dungeons for doing skill based things though, then these skills would become more useful.
The main problem with this is that dungeons are predictable. If you put certain skill based challenges in certain dungeons people will weigh the costs/benefits of bringing skill based characters along and then only take characters with the skills needed for that dungeon.
So in order to make skill based characters useful like they are in say, a D&D campaign, dungeons would need to be randomized because anything else is eventually going to have walkthroughs that show you how to do every step of the dungeon.
In Uncharted Waters Online, however, it works in part because the game isn't primarily about combat. Exploration and trading are as important as combat, and if you have a ship designed to be good at one of the three, it's going to be bad at the other two. Most PVP battles in the game thus have one side massively stronger than the other, with the other trying to escape--and often successful in doing so. Actually, a large chunk of attempted PVP battles result in the would-be attacker failing to even formally initiate combat.
It also helps that in UWO, you can switch ships freely at any port, and switch classes often albeit with somewhat more difficulty. So even if you go with a build that's terrible for combat for a few days, that doesn't mean you can't switch out of it later. Thus, you're not locked into forever being useless in combat.
Unfortunately where that's gotten us is games where classes all just take different approaches to the same function, character customization is almost non-existent, and gameplay feels boring and uninspired.
To be clear I would rather play a single player game, MOBA, or RTS than WoW or SWTOR in their current forms. They've gutted all the depth and soul that has kept me playing MMOs despite my intense hatred of stat disparity and grinding. Even most of the people I know that play them say they hate what's been done to them but are so attached to their characters that they aren't ready to quit.
If things like lockpick and trap disarming are never taken then the application of them needs to be increased and the penalties to combat reduced.
Think KOTOR(Single player) or Deus Ex. You can use repairing skills to bring allied NPCs into fights, hacking skills to thin out clusters of NPCs or bypass difficult content, and demolition skills not only to disarm traps but to set up traps that can benefit you during a fight.
Suppose for a moment there is a major boss fight. You can use lockpicking to open up a side passage into a sewer system. Then a high strength party member can bust a wall that causes the boss chamber to partially flood, taking out some ads and allowing you to jump into the water to remove a fire based DOT that the boss will apply.
Even though the rogue is not as useful as an archery based fighter build for the actual boss fight, which would you rather have for that encounter?
Set it up so that room is one of many rooms you may encounter in a randomly generated dungeon. With many of those other rooms also having skill based work arounds to make the encounter easier, and a skill based rogue starts to sound like a more valuable addition to the party. And if they aren't, then decrease the gap in strength between them and a pure combat character until they are.