Balancing Issues and Feedback

[DumbassofDojima]

Avowed has some balancing / numbers issues I'd like to list out as feedback for the devs. Most of this relates to my playthrough focused on melee.

- First of all, character bonuses from perks and gear are not properly reflected on the character sheet or the items you use. For example, the ranger perk that increases one handed melee damage by 50% when maxed does not display when equipping a one handed weapon. The weapon's base damage value is displayed the same regardless of any bonuses, and the character sheet does not list the player's current DPS in a hard number. In practice, this means that every time the player looks at an item, they to remember their current perks and bonuses, and then run the mental math on the weapon's values to figure out how much damage the weapon actually does.

- Secondly, even with that 50% damage increase, a one handed sword is still outclassed in raw damage by a two handed greatsword of the same Tier with no additional bonuses or perks. While it makes sense that a player who specializes in two handers will do more damage, to have baseline two handed weapon damage without any perks or gear bonuses augmenting it still outclass a heavy investment into one handed weapons makes the character build feel bad. I've spent the last few hours using an Exceptional Greatsword (135 damage) instead of an Exceptional Sword (120 damage with the perk applied) because the Greatsword does 15 more damage than the sword. If you put three points into Piercing Strikes, then the longsword's power attacks (228) can outclass the basic Exceptional Greatsword's power attacks (208) by about 20 damage, assuming the perk for 50% one handed damage is additive to the Piercing Strikes' 40% power attack bonus, and that the damage of power attacks is roughly 50%. That is six levels of investment into perks to be able to beat an Exceptional Greatsword's baseline damage (barely) on a single attack type, and requires you to be level 15. My point here isn't that two handers should be less powerful than one handers, it's that they should be less powerful for players who specialize in one handers over two handers.

- The current balancing of the crafting and gold economy is dire. In the first area of the game, you mostly get common items that you will then need to break down in the inventory for crafting materials to improve your gear. This is the objective best use for the common items you find as you need A LOT of crafting materials to upgrade a Common item to a Fine item, and the weapons sell for 30 gold. Once you hit the second area, however, this dynamic completely changes because of the increased number of Fine gear
you acquire, and they sell for 700-ish gold, so it's actually way better to start selling all your gear to buy better gear. If you're trying to keep a unique item up to par, it's a bit less clear cut, but because you require so many crafting materials to upgrade gear, it's a hefty investment and you'll likely have to switch to other gear unless you do a full completionist run through the area. The area specific upgrade plants provide a pretty hard bottleneck on the amount of gear you can even upgrade with crafting. I initially planned to do a swashbuckler build with dual pistols and a one handed sword for melee, but it was too prohibitively expensive to run the upkeep on three weapons and my armor, so I was forced to disregard the pistols, and then later on due to the one handed damage balancing, I swapped to a greatsword... I'm in the third area now, and have received basically zero Exceptional items from loot drops or chests there, so I can't even craft the upgrades to get my gear to Superb, further incentivizing me to buy gear. I also didn't know the dynamic would switch going from area 1 to 2, either, so had I been selling all that gear instead of scrapping it, I'd be in a position to comfortably buy better gear and still have change.

- Stability as a stat on shields does not seem useful. As far as I can tell, no other piece of gear I have found increases or decreases a stability stat. There is no stability stat on the character sheet either. I understand different armor classes (light, medium, heavy) have different stability ratings (not displayed), but without a hard number for the overall stability rating, the purpose of it on shields is unclear. At best, I would assume the shield stability rating (20) can push the stability of one armor class to the one above. If the stability rating on the shield can't do that, however, then it is functionally a useless stat. This is compounded further by the fact that I think every single shield shares the same stability rating of 20.

- Damage Reduction Percentage % and Damage Reduction Number # should likely be one stat. While I understand the way it works is that the DR% mitigates a percentage of damage from the hit, which is then subtracted by the DR#, leading to the final amount of damage the player takes, because, as far as I can tell, there are no other pieces of gear that increase Damage Reduction % outside of the one armor piece players can equip, DR% and DR# are functionally the same thing. Parsing armor values would be much clearer if these were combined into the same stat. DR% is more flexible, but seeing as nothing else really affects it (to my knowledge), it makes more sense to just give it a higher DR#. I guess Arcane Veil does give 50% DR, so you could combo that with armor to potentially shave off more damage than a static DR#, but if nothing else really affects DR%, I still think the system is too convoluted for its own good, especially because I think DR% on armor caps at 30% for heavy armor, so the one niche scenario is a heavy armor user using Arcane Veil to mitigate 80% of damage, which is effective, but hardly a strong justification for there to be two different armor stats on every single piece of armor that every player will have to deal with.

- The parry unlock is bizarre. Let me explain. The perk on the ranger tree that unlocks parrying allows you to do it with one handed weapons, shields, and two handers. However, if you use anything in your off hand, you can't parry with a one handed weapon, but there are also no perks or gear bonuses I've found that increase player damage when wielding just a one handed weapon with nothing in their off hand. This means that to even be able to use the parry with a one handed weapon, the player is running at a strict disadvantage. There is no reason not to use a shield when using a one handed a weapon if you want to parry, especially since one handed weapons have a worse block rating, and they don't even have a parry efficiency rating listed like shields do. If you could still parry while also having an item in the off hand like a gun or grimoire, then it would make sense, but the current implementation means there is literally no scenario where it is ever beneficial for the player to parry with a one handed weapon.

- The issue above also applies to the perk that lets you reflect projectiles with a wand or shield parry. You cannot have anything in your off hand to use the wand parry, which is strictly worse than using a shield and a wand. The ideal solution here to to allow parrying with a single handed weapon and still allow the use of a weapon in the off hand. Perhaps the current control scheme prevented this, however.

- There is no reason to dual wield melee weapons. Dual wielding a melee weapon and a ranged weapon gives you a quick ranged option, so that's solid, but there are no additional movesets or damage gains from dual wielding two swords, for instance. The only time I could see any potential reason to dual wield melee weapons is if you have two Unique weapons that proc different status effects, but this is a highly specific scenario for an entire game system. Even Skyrim gives you a special dual wield power attack, but I would have liked to see unique dual wield attacks for basic attacks in Avowed too. As it is, there is never any benefit to using a one handed melee weapon without a shield, and almost no reason to dual wield melee weapons. There aren't even any perks or bonuses to incentivize dual wielding despite the dual hand system inherently allowing it. If anything, dual wielding at all becomes burdensome as you need to level up both gun/wand damage and one handed weapon damage on top of the increased financial/crafting cost of maintaining more gear.

- Medium armor is superior to Heavy and Light because of the perks that allows you to dramatically reduce the stamina and essence penalty. The Fighter perk Armored Grace reduces the stamina cap penalty on Heavy and Medium, and then the Wizard perk Armored Essence reduces the Essence cap on Medium and Light, so if you invest a few points into those, Medium armor is positioned much better than either of the other two armor classes, especially because all playstyles will use Essence and Stamina since ranged attacks use stamina and melee abilities consume essence.

- When leveling character attributes, the game says that bonuses stop at level 15. I assumed this meant cap for attributes is 15, but when I leveled up past level 15 I did not receive an attribute point. If this is a bug, then feel free to disregard this as an issue, but if it is intentional, the wording is extremely unclear and did not properly communicate (to me) that attribute points from level ups stop being given out at Level 15.

- Many unique item bonuses are, for lack of a better term, useless. -5% damage from vessels, beasts, etc is such a negligible amount of reduced damage that the player will likely never feel it in practice or find it to be an item worth equipping. Generally speaking, I find flat percentage bonuses to be unexciting, but it's a little late to be rebottling the genie, so imo these sort of extremely minor bonuses should be buffed to somewhere in the 20% range. Things like crit rate bonuses on certain items being 1% should probably be closer to 5%, minimum 3%. I assume there was a fear of making gear too overpowered, but considering Unique gear is the most exciting reward Avowed has to offer, it's much better for it be closer to overpowered than so underpowered it wouldn't make the cut for a common Borderlands randomized loot bonus.

- Chest contents are generally unexciting. The focus on the crafting system means that way too many chests primarily exist as dispensers for crafting supplies. This significantly devalues the excitement of finding a chest, but it's also ridiculous too that a Hoarder's Lockbox hidden atop rickety scaffolding leading up to the crumbled remains of a tower with a precipitous drop to certain death below chose this place to hide their most guarded treasure: twigs, iron ore, and fifty coins. I get not every chest can have a unique item, but some kind of scaling to increase the likelihood of area appropriate gear would at least alleviate the issue.

- Gear upgrading is needlessly complex. For a unique item, there are three separate upgrade tracks. The first is its Tier, which overrides basically everything else. Then, within that Tier, there is the level, 1-3 which offers marginal bonuses against enemies fought within that same Tier. Finally, there is the Enchantment upgrade paths. All of these require different crafting materials to increase. This is genuinely way too much to be dealing with, and feels needlessly overdesigned, especially with the current state of the crafting economy. The gear tier stuff got patched today, so maybe that makes the between Tier gear upgrades more meaningful, but if it doesn't, the bonuses from that second upgrade path simply don't matter anywhere near enough as the flat upgrades from one Tier to another.

- Saved this for last as I have not had the opportunity to see how the updated Gear Tier vs Enemy Tier system works, but if it is closer to the early access launch, it has major issues. The main problem is that the areas use a mix of two tiers of enemies in the same encounters, but gear tiers dramatically increase the damage you do or take. This meant in the second area, I didn't upgrade to exceptional gear right away as I was afraid I would one shot all the Fine Tier enemies, and if I used Exceptional armor, Fine Tier enemies would do too little damage to me to pose a threat. Unfortunately, this also meant I had to deal with taking way more and dealing way less damage to Exceptional Tier enemies. The player is essentially given two bad choices. Either being underpowered to the point of frustration, or overpowered to the point of boredom. It sounds like the update makes it overall scale less rigidly, but I still think having a system like this that functionally flattens every other statistic is a genuinely poor fit for this kind of game. Not having a level scaled world is fine, welcome even if executed well (it never is imo), but to shackle the player and enemy damages to gear rarity tiers in place of just running the numbers like other RPGs is not great. There is also a real clarity issue with the system too because a Tier 3 Two Skull monster as a marker for difficulty compared to a monster just being like, level 10 or something, is needlessly confusing. Given that Avowed is fully released and designed around this Tier system, I doubt this can or will change, if Obsidian even wants to, but I still wanted to outline a few of the issues I have with it.

Well, that's the end. I'm assuming no one read all this (maybe any of it), but if you did, I hope some of it was of any value at all. I'm sure there are other areas with balance issues, but these are ones I felt were severe enough to warrant posting this. It may not seem like it after all this, but I am not a min-maxer, I just noticed and thought about these various issues during my current playthrough. Thank you for reading.

[DeadJericho]

nice post
i agree about the chests being unexciting largely.
however i get excited when i see a purple or orange glow on one.

as for the rest of your post. i defer to your analysis of it.

[LeithLion]

That was very thorough. Excellent job. Also, I find that the main quests tend to give me easy fights for my level and the side quests make me feel like I need higher tier equipment because half the normal fights feel like a boss fight. I don't think the skull ratings for quest accurately depict the enemy difficulty.

[DumbassofDojima]

Originally posted by DeadJericho:

nice post
i agree about the chests being unexciting largely.
however i get excited when i see a purple or orange glow on one.

as for the rest of your post. i defer to your analysis of it.

Getting Uniques from chests can be exciting for sure, though I think it would be nice if chests with Uniques were visually distinct from others since it can almost feel random when some chests have unique items while other, much hard to reach chests have like crafting materials.

[DumbassofDojima]

Originally posted by LeithLion:

That was very thorough. Excellent job. Also, I find that the main quests tend to give me easy fights for my level and the side quests make me feel like I need higher tier equipment because half the normal fights feel like a boss fight. I don't think the skull ratings for quest accurately depict the enemy difficulty.

The enemy balancing is really odd, made worse by how Avowed blends higher tier enemies into encounters will lower tier ones. My power level basically never felt consistent until the last five or so hours in the last area of the game when I had a max Tier weapon. I'm somewhat interested in giving Path of the Damned a go at some point, but probably gonna wait a bit, I think.

[DeadJericho]

Originally posted by DumbassofDojima:

Originally posted by DeadJericho:

nice post
i agree about the chests being unexciting largely.
however i get excited when i see a purple or orange glow on one.

as for the rest of your post. i defer to your analysis of it.

Getting Uniques from chests can be exciting for sure, though I think it would be nice if chests with Uniques were visually distinct from others since it can almost feel random when some chests have unique items while other, much hard to reach chests have like crafting materials.

i agree, the placement of them seems weird.
i would expect climbing a difficult tower or something to reward me more than just finding a chest under a bridge or something

[DumbassofDojima]

Originally posted by DeadJericho:

Originally posted by DumbassofDojima:

Getting Uniques from chests can be exciting for sure, though I think it would be nice if chests with Uniques were visually distinct from others since it can almost feel random when some chests have unique items while other, much hard to reach chests have like crafting materials.

i agree, the placement of them seems weird.
i would expect climbing a difficult tower or something to reward me more than just finding a chest under a bridge or something

I wonder how much the loot is randomized, but then Unique's probably aren't randomized at all placement-wise, I wouldn't think.