Skill balancing issues: Perseverance, Bigger and better, Retribution.

[ワイバーン の とし]

(for consideration purposes only)

These results were produced by running game on classic mode, seeing how there is no harder difficulty as of right now.

Retribution
To get the best out of retribution you need either warfare specced Lohse or have entire party dead. By itself its a good ability and its not even that small - 10% damage compared to 5 on most other skills, the problems stems from condition - you need to be hit, which is not too likely to be happening.
Its a defensive ability and you are supposed to be stacking it up, yet compared to say leadership which flat out gives 5% resistnace to 3 people plus 5% dodge to all -> 15% + 15% and is ALWAYS active as long as you dont ♥♥♥♥ up positioning and LoS.
Solution: simplest one - buff retribution to 15%. There are still no guarantees that enemy is going to be attacking your tank, but now its having a marginally bigger impact when they do.
I absolutely love retribution as a choice.

Bigger and better
What it does is gives you 1 attribute point. Talents are few and hard to find, and among them exists 'All skilled up" which gives 1 combat and 1 civic choice. If you want to get that 1 stat point, you simply take 'all skilled up ' and invest the point in Polymorph. That gives you the that same 1 stat point, ASWELL as if this is your 1st point in polymorph - access to an entire array of abilities, allowing bigger choices, AND it gives you a civil point. A much better choice.
Solution: BaB to give 2, or maybe even 3 attribute points. Why 3? There are a lot of stats to invest in, but overall progression is not that important in them as far as impact goes, meanwhile 1 skill point for combat abilities early on can make all the difference in the world.
Suggested solution: go with 2, -> this provides 10% bonus damage to selected weapon group. 3 might be way too good.

Perseverance
Beyond worthless as it is right now. At what point does it do anything? Who is going to have it? It only applies to 4 status effects which rob you of a turn to give you a 5% (lmao) per point.
Conditions: you need to be stripped off of armor/magic armor for status effects to even be applied, for that to happen person needs to be focused down and to really benefit you need to have the character with a lot of armor. You dont put this on a dude standing in backlines with a bow/wands who is doing his best to stay out of danger.
Meanwhile the points in perseverance could be put into something else for much better effect - be it magic, weapons or even leadership.
So how does one balance this out?
The simplest solution is to up the bonus to something like 20%-25% per point. Even then you are going to be spending 4 points into skill that might never get used > enemy might simply opt out of stunning you after stripping your armor instead going for bleeds, polymorphs etc.
Other solution would be to expand the range of status effects that it affects, but once again that doesnt do much, unless the perseverance damage is tweaked but then comes a possible situation when the enemy simply cant kill you, because you regen more armor then they can do damage.
So how to balance this so its worth it but not broken? What if its 'pro active'? Like say you are getting hit by a skill that would stun you, even if it doesnt stun, you get the armor, same for other effects. This will also enable strats involving friendly fire hail strikes. Expand status effects to 'crippled' and 'shocked". Adjust value to 7% from 5%. I do believe this will make it at least 'pickable'. Its still not going to be 'best choice'.

Other notes:
Duck Duck Goose, aswell as current effect would benefit from getting +5% Dodge.
Why does telekinesis exist as a 'civil ability'. I see no application for it, seeing how i can throw a wyvern looking thing around with teleporting gloves.
Killing shriekers and Alexander before the bums from seeker camp move near the ship breaks whatever flags are set up. They refuse to move in because of shriekers when everything inside is dead.

Special thanks to developers for creating this incredible game! You guys are amazing, i hope you'll sell 10 million copies and get to work on something else equally great! <3

[Enor]

Honestly i believe the entire talent selection needs to be looked at again for balancing. a lot of them are pretty much copy paste from the original dos and make absolutely no sense. bigger and better being one of them.

other talents like backstab requiring a talent is retarded. that should just be something inherent to daggers. perhaps maybe extra backstab dmg or a bigger cone so less positioning is required.

talents need to have bigger effects because they are far and few. they should define your character and make him stand out. this +5% dodge really is boring and tasteless. get rid of it. perhaps the ability to counter attack. maybe a taunt ability. hell a lot of people have been screaming for a taunt ability and yet nothing has been done about it. there really needs to be an aggro system but i think the game is too far into development for that to happen.

edit:
pet pal i think is a poor choice for a talent as well. it really should be automatically given to the pc. no need to spend a talent on it. i honestly think they just threw it into the list because of lack of talents.

[Stabbey]

I have to wonder if Larian has even one person working on Talents, because for Bigger and Better to still be complete dog feces after 9 months and 5 patches, clearly they haven't been paying attention at all.

3 Attribute points is still way, way too small in exchange for 1 Talent point. Attribute points are worth a LOT less compared to the first game (starting attribute values are doubled to 10, you get 4 times as many attribute points per level). You get 1 Talent point every 4 levels, those same 4 levels give you 8 attribute points. Bigger and Better should give either 4-6 attribute points for players to freely distribute (2-3 levels worth) or maybe +1 each to all attributes (but you can't redistribute it). (Maybe +2 each if you increase the level requirement to 8 or so.)


6 of the 10 skill schools are magic focused, and yet there are only 7 mage-focused Talents in TOTAL, and 3 of those are mediocre to bad. It's another sign that Talents have been outright ignored in development.

***

I like the idea of Perserverance giving you armor if you get bit by a status it works on even if you are not affected by the status.

Duck Duck Goose should have a requirement of 1 Scoundrel OR 1 Huntsman. I've also suggested combining it with Escapist.


Telekinesis is pretty lousy and doesn't let you do a lot of things you should be able to like interacting with non-pickups from a distance.

[baardvaark]

Is it just me or does perseverance now return a flat armor amount (5 per level I think) rather than a percentage of your armor (or perhaps it always did this, never really tried it before?) If so, it's even worse than I thought, except for maybe at level 1 or 2 where it will heal more than 5% of your tiny amount of armor.

Or does it heal a minimum of 5 armor (with 1 point in perseverance), or more if 5% of your total armor is greater?

I hope we'll be able to mod in custom talents. I believe it was possible in the old game with a workaround that could let you use an object or something if you had a spare talent point, remove that talent point, and grant an effect that way, but would be nice to be able to just use the talent menu. Could mod in a couple dozen new talents pretty fast either way, which I will definitely do if they don't add a bunch more.