Suggestions for Devs - Some Bow Skills like "Power Shot" and other skills with "Flat" Damage need improvement (also other skill suggestions inside)...

[Talos]

Just posting these suggestions and feedback here that I hope can be useful. It seems clear there are a very few select skills that people say are super strong - notably Earthquake, Vampiric Touch. On the flip side many people have said that many of the other skills can be very underwhelming, and I agree based on my own experience testing some of the other skills. I know this is a long post, but I feel it provides a lot of useful information. It is a combination of my own personal play experience in Alaloth, in addition to my own separate limited experience in software/game design, along with what I have read in many posts here on the forums from other players and watched in various Alaloth gameplay videos. Also, as one of the devs mentioned before in another post, balance can be very complex, so sometimes it requires an in depth analysis and details. I suggest people try to consider the game from all build perspectives when considering balance, and not just focus on the most overpowered or meta build, or one specific build type.

I think there are two problems with many of the non meta skills (i.e. not Earthquake or Vampiric Touch). One of the biggest issues is that some of the "pure flat damage" type skills seem to have absolutely no scaling on them or very little scaling (they do not increase much or at all as the player level increases or gets better gear) and in some cases they cannot even seem to crit. The result with this is that early game they are good, but as you get to mid and end game they begin to fall off very hard and end up doing less damage than basic weapon attacks in some cases. Secondly, some of the 'utility' type skills don't offer enough utility to be worth slotting. Now if this was a traditional RPG where you could slot 8 or 10 skills it would not be a big issue because any added utility is a bonus - but when you are limited to only 4 skills, a utility skill with low "utility" becomes not worth using a precious slot on.

I will give some specific examples and suggestions below, and anyone can feel free to chime in. I think improving these other skills will help build diversity and possibilities and we will see less of everyone using and suggesting vamp touch and earthquake.

First for the damage skills, I think many of them suffer from a common problem, but I will use one very specific example since I tested it out myself with my own impressions. The Marksman Skill "Power Shot" needs some serious improvement. It is supposed to be a pure hard hitting sniper type bow shot (you are even restricted from using it at close range), but in mid/endgame it's damage is not great at all. In many cases, 1 or 2 light attacks from a strong weapon will do MORE damage than Power Shot, and use LESS stamina, and won't have the 8 second cooldown of Power Shot either. You can try to build it some for cooldown, but then you are making some sacrifices if you do that, and even then, it's damage stays relatively low. Power Shot also does not seem to scale at all or much as you level up. You get to a point where when you face a strong enemy, you activate skill and do this cool animation of a strong bow shot - but it takes only a small SLIVER of their huge health bar. Even worse, Power Shot does not seem to crit. I am pretty sure I have seen some skills crit, so why the sniper type bow shot does not crit does not seem to make sense - if anything it should have bonus crit.

1. The solution to Power Shot and "pure flat damage" skills like it is twofold. Remember these skills I am referring to first here like Power shot are skills that offer only damage, they have no utility - so their damage should be good and strong even at high levels.

A. The Flat damage skills with no added utility need some sort of scaling that increases the damage beyond the current flat value as the player levels up. It can either be a scaling value where the skill increases as the player levels, or it can add an additional modifier to the existing flat value based on your weapon damage (some skills already do this like the Mighty blow). Power Shot needs something like this so it can scale appropriately. Also obviously some of the magic skills that can be spammed much more often at base cooldown would have lesser base damage than a bow sniper shot, but they still may need some type of scaling to stay relevant. I personally have not used many of the mage damage skills so I am only directly commenting on power shot - if someone else has a lot of experience with the mage damage skills, feel free to add input.

B. These skills definitely need to be able to crit. These are damage skills and their only purpose is to do damage. When you choose to slot them you are giving up a potential heal or buff or summon skill, so these damage skills using up a slot need to be able to crit.

2. For utility skills, I will give the example of the druid root skill. Currently the damage on this becomes insignificant at higher levels, and the root is single target and not a huge duration. So basically all this allows you to do is root one enemy for a short amount of time. In hard fights with many mobs, or a boss who has multiple adds, simply being able to root 1 enemy for a few seconds does not do much overall. I would suggest 2 possible solutions.

A. If you are going the route that this is mainly a utility skill, then keep its dmg low, but it's utility needs to be increased - it either needs the duration of root to be increased greatly, or it needs to be multi target.
B. If you want it to be a hybrid dmg/utility skill and you keep duration the same and single target, then it needs a decent amount more dmg, or some type of scaling added to the damage.

Last point as a total side note - Please do not further nerf Player Stat/trait/skill values.
Over the last few patches many of the player stats and traits have been reduced pretty significantly. Examples - Strength used to give 5% bonus damage per level for a total of 25% bonus at max, was nerfed to 3% per level for 15% max bonus. Dex used to give 2% crit per level and 2% stam reduction use, for 10% on each at max bonus - was nerfed to half so now gives 1% bonus on each for 5% max total bonus if all 5 levels invested. All of the cooldown reduction traits were reduced in benefit - they used to give a -20% cooldown to one specific school if you used a trait point on them, then that was reduced to a -15% cooldown reduction. I am not saying that those were bad adjustments, I am just suggesting to not reduce them any more. If you reduce them any more you will really diminish greatly the value and fun of leveling up, as well as diminish build diversity/uniqueness. People will often be disappointed and complain if "level up" skills or bonuses become so small or insignificant that they are almost meaningless, because then you don't really "feel" the effect of your choices much if the values become too minimal.

[Creator]

Originally posted by Talos:

I think improving these other skills will help build diversity and possibilities

Yeah good idea. Doing the scaling would permit people to use more diverse spells.

It's unfortunate when some skills included in an rpg gets so weak with time that the people end up not using them.

[Talos]

Originally posted by Creator:

Originally posted by Talos:

I think improving these other skills will help build diversity and possibilities

Yeah good idea. Doing the scaling would permit people to use more diverse spells.

It's unfortunate when some skills included in an rpg gets so weak with time that the people end up not using them.

Thanks for the reply - and yes I agree with you. I can think of so many other rpgs or action rpgs that might have a huge variety of skills or spells that might sound cool or have nice animations, but that nobody ever uses or appreciates because of how little of an effect or use they have - or because they lack some sort of bonus scaling to keep them effective as the player levels up into late game. It's a shame too when this happens, because a lot of love and creativity went into the design and animation of lesser used ineffective skills or skills that do not add some scaling as the player levels, and the player never ends up appreciating it if they are only choosing from a small pool of other more effective choices.

Also as an additional point to the developers, so that they do not misunderstand what I am suggesting - I am not saying all the skills need to be perfectly exactly the same in effectiveness. It is fine if some are a little more effective than others - or some more effective in certain situations. It does not need to be perfectly standardized balance - that actually can be bad for another reason because it can actually make things boring when things are all the same in usage effect and are just reskins etc. No, my point instead is just to try to be sure that some skills are not so low in effectiveness that they end up being very rarely chosen or completely outshined by other choices - all skills should be impactful and have at least decent power. This is especially important in a game like Alaloth where we can only choose to have 4 skills in our builds.

Also, there were a bunch of posts about this topic before, but since the forums have slowed down a little lately, not as many recently. I just found 2 quick examples to quote here from prior posts - not sure if the Devs saw these back then or not, so just referencing them here in case below -

Originally posted by Rex:

Originally posted by Yerude:

Does the Bow Skill scale with physical dmg increase items? Or even with other weapons?
The Magic Skills do not scale with magic increase items. I don't know if it is intended or a but yet. How does it work with the marksman skills?
Honestly, i was super confused. I also was looking where i could buy a bow so i can try out the marksman skills. I didn't spent points on the marksman skilltree, because i didn't know it is possible to use them without a bow. I think it must be more clear in the description, otherwise alot people would think this way.

Good question. I've been wondering the same, 'cause Magic seems to be very weak and unbalanced atm. It's strange how melee does 10000 times more dmg than spells, which seems super odd to me. But I trust it's all WIP at the moment. And I pray that further down the road Devs will realize and let us build more magic-focused / bow-focused builds. 'Cause, it's all already ingame, already implemented (bows, spells, staves, animations, vfx, gear, assets, all already ingame) is just a matter of a little bit of creativity and will from the Devs, for this to be done. But it could be done without affecting anything regarding design principles or anything, and would just add a ton in terms of customization, and the sense of freedom, imho.

Originally posted by Yerude:

The only good skill of the necromancer is the life steal buff. Any other skills are a waste.

The Dmg Aura does so little damage and doesn't scale with magic items. It always deals 130 dmg, even if you have magic dmg increase items on. And it also only deals the dmg to a mob once. And is also very short. Maybe it could deal the dmg more often in theory, but because it is that short, it fairly doesn't happen.

Originally posted by Galaturc:

- The skills that offer a specific amount of direct damage or dot don't scale well in general.

So as seen here, other people have also mentioned this issue about some of the less effective skills needing help and some needing additional bonus damage scaling as player levels or progresses. They should be taking something from the bonuses from gear to phys or mag dmg and crit also, or at least have some sort of % modifier that is either based on weapon base dmg or a % modifier that adds some extra additional damage that scales with player level overall that is added to the current base damage value of the skill/spell. They also definitely should be affected by any buffs/debuffs skills/spells/effects that describe the respective matching damage type.

[Mario8bit]

I used to post about magic skills with flat damage issue about a week ago. I also agree that most of skills need to be reworked to balance usefulness and encourage build diversity.

This is critical issue because it is core feature of game. I hope dev team will not ignore this issue or the game will has no replayability at all. It can make game end up like other cash grab EA that you can play only once with DW daggers + vamp touch + earthquake build.

[Talos]

Originally posted by Mario8bit:

I used to post about magic skills with flat damage issue about a week ago. I also agree that most of skills need to be reworked to balance usefulness and encourage build diversity.

This is critical issue because it is core feature of game. I hope dev team will not ignore this issue or the game will has no replayability at all. It can make game end up like other cash grab EA that you can play only once with DW daggers + vamp touch + earthquake build.

Thanks for the input Mario and for posting your feedback. Both the bow and magic skills suffer from this same limiting issue. Hopefully they will see these posts and suggestions and implement it into the game.

I do however want to give them huge complements and praise on the items and weapons and gear side of the game where they have done GREAT and we have a big variety of cool and powerful/unique things to find and use (I hope they continue to add more cool new ones with updates) which helps greatly in build diversity from that angle. I just hope they can also apply this same effectiveness/usefulness to the skills and spells side of the game to make sure all of the choices can be useful and worked into a variety of builds and playstyles.

This issue is key to keeping their game alive and to keep people playing. Otherwise, as you say in your example, a lot of people will come in initially and play through only once with that Dual wield vamp touch/earthquake build you mentioned, then get bored of the game and disappear.

Also, the fact that we haven't seen much replies from devs on this issue makes it hard to even tell how much of this issue might just be bugs/not implemented yet factor that they know is missing and it will be fixed soon versus intended game design (and even if it is intended I hope and think they should still consider these posts). Perfect example is that on the side of a possible "bug" I posted in another topic that the Bow skill "Power Shot" is not even boosted by the skill/spell that is supposed to increase all physical dmg by a certain %. That seems a clear bug since the icon on tooltip for the spell's description of what damage type it should boost it shows the exact same icon and dmg type as the description of the "Power Shot" skill's damage type, yet it is giving 0 boost to Power Shot when I cast the spell (and I think the wording on spell even goes so far to say something like "increases all physical damage" by x%).

I'm sure a lot of people in similiar situations will also end up wasting respec orbs if they end up choosing these skills and then see that they are bugged currently and not getting boosted as expected.

[Eldacar]

We are on numbers guys,
wait for it

[Talos]

Originally posted by Eldacar:

We are on numbers guys,
wait for it

Thank you for letting us know. This is good to hear that you are aware of this issue and are working on solutions. Thanks again for the continued updates and interactions with the community.

[Mario8bit]

Originally posted by Talos:

I do however want to give them huge complements and praise on the items and weapons and gear side of the game where they have done GREAT and we have a big variety of cool and powerful/unique things to find and use (I hope they continue to add more cool new ones with updates) which helps greatly in build diversity from that angle. I just hope they can also apply this same effectiveness/usefulness to the skills and spells side of the game to make sure all of the choices can be useful and worked into a variety of builds and playstyles.

Yes, I like item variety and item hunting is quite fun in this game too. It gives me the sense of exploration like Oblivion/Skyrim or even Dark Souls. Having some gears for specific builds, gears that unlock some special ability or skills modifiers are also cool features to have IMO. I think it will give us some vibes from soul-like games (while combat is already soul-like anyway.)

Originally posted by Eldacar:

We are on numbers guys,
wait for it

Hi Dev Guy. Thanks for letting us know this. Please keep up you good work!