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"Based on Stat" tooltips are not always accurate


Slarti

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Specifically, it looks like they are accurate for direct damage abilities (which is good, because many of these have changed to use a stat that makes more sense, like Blade Sweep using Strength), but not for most support abilities, like buffing.

 

There appear to be some support abilities that do use the listed stats. Shaman summon spells are influenced by Intelligence (apparently) as well as points in the summon skill; however, Call of the Frenzy is influenced by points in the skill, but NOT by Strength; and turrets, as discussed elsewhere, are not influenced by either one.

 

It looks like Blademaster buffs mostly aren't influenced by Strength, but I'm not sure this is generalizable. For example, Charge Weapons IS actually boosted by Intelligence.

 

 

The good news is that, while *which* stat is involved is still hardcoded, and some details related to summons appear to be hardcoded, for buffs, the difference looks like it is clearly derived from differences in the ability definitions.

 

Those differences involve properties with confusingly similar names, so (in combination with the number of tooltips that were added) it looks very likely that this was unintentional. (Either the existence of the tooltips for every skill, even those that aren't boosted by a primary stat; or the fact that the primary stats don't boost some skills.)

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If you are emailing them, I suggest also pointing out (1) that this problem exists with the class-specific stat tooltips, as well as skill tooltips; and (2) that the Turret Craft skill currently seems to do absolutely nothing (except for the buffs that appear at levels 3 and 7). Or, I guess, just point them to this thread.

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No, although it looks like the turret skills themselves did not add levels then, either. (Also, it looks like Shaman summons worked the same way in Av2, though Jeff may have changed them for Av3.) Key evidence here:

 

http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/20103-shaman-summon-mechanics-very-wierd-probably-bugged/#entry267011

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I'll include this here from another topic, as it's relevant to incorrect tooltip information: I've confirmed that the Shadowwalker's Lightning Discipline skill (if at level 7 or higher) gives a chance at Battle Frenzy upon receiving any type of damage (including magic, elemental, and ranged physical), not just "melee" damage as the tooltip incorrectly states.

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Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

 

For bug reports, specificity is everything. In this whole thing, I only found one skill that was specifically listed as using the wrong value: Call of the Frenzy. (I will look at the issue with Lightning Discipline separately.)

 

Linking to old bug reports, especially 3 year old bug reports for different games which use code that was entirely rewritten for Avadon 3, isn't useful to me. I'm not saying Avadon 2 doesn't have a bug. I know you're trying to be helpful. But it's not helpful for this issue.

 

Anyway. I just fired up the game in debug, used Call of the Frenzy several times, and went through all the ability code step by step. It DOES use strength.

 

However, it doesn't use it much. Basically, it does a base amount of 3 levels, and then increases this amount by 5% per point of strength. So if your strength is 10, there is a 50% chance of increasing the duration by 1, applied 3 times. (So, on average, the duration becomes 4.5.) Because the change of every point of strength is so small, I can see why you'd think it was going off of the wrong ability.

 

This is a small effect, which means this is a legitimate balance issue. Call of the Frenzy is a STRONG ability, so I am really nervous about buffing it too much. But I will change the bonus to 10%. This is a serious, top branch ability, after all.

 

But hey, I might be wrong. I certainly have been before. If you are SURE Call of Frenzy goes off intelligence, why do you think so? If you think you can prove it, Send a compressed saved game to support@spiderwebsoftware.com and I will try it out. If there really is a bug, I will gladly admit I am wrong.

 

If there are any other specific abilities you can name that have issues, again, name them. A saved game to serve as evidence helps.

 

Thank you very much for your help!

 

- Jeff Vogel

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However, it doesn't use it much. Basically, it does a base amount of 3 levels, and then increases this amount by 5% per point of strength. So if your strength is 10, there is a 50% chance of increasing the duration by 1, applied 3 times. (So, on average, the duration becomes 4.5.) Because the change of every point of strength is so small, I can see why you'd think it was going off of the wrong ability.

 

This is a small effect, which means this is a legitimate balance issue. Call of the Frenzy is a STRONG ability, so I am really nervous about buffing it too much. But I will change the bonus to 10%. This is a serious, top branch ability, after all.

Thanks for taking a look at this, Jeff. (And sorry for the annoyance this has caused.)

 

First off, I don't think anyone was suggesting it keyed off Intelligence. The suggestion was that it doesn't gain a benefit from Strength.

 

However, what you describe above is definitely not how the game behaves. I am retesting it now to make sure. Unfortunately, that's just not what it's doing.

 

When I strip and retrain my current game's Khalida, with 6 points in COTF skill, no points or specs in bottom tier (which has a buff duration bonus), and all stat points into Endurance, this gives her a strength of 8. COTF usually gives 3 levels of BF, and occasionally 4 levels. It NEVER gives 5 or 6 levels, even though this should happen at least 16% of the time, according to the logic above (with 3 independent 40% chances, at 8 Strength, to gain a point).

 

When I then retrain Khalida identically, except with all stat points into Strength, she has 22 Strength. That's a 110% bonus, in theory. However, the results of using the ability are identical: usually 3 levels of BF, occasionally 4 levels, never 5 or 6. Strength really does not appear to have any effect, if you isolate for it.

 

I strongly suspect that the occasional bonus level comes from the COTF skill training itself. The reason: if you bump the COTF training level up from 6 points, to 7, the ability use dialogue box suddenly says BF will last 4 turns instead of 3. The math for this lines up perfectly: 3 levels times 1.30 (from 6 levels of +5% from the skill) = 3.90. 3 levels times 1.35 (from 7 levels of +5% from the skill) = 4.05. Looks like the dialogue box truncates the decimal, but perhaps translates it into a chance of +1 level, when the skill is actually used. (Also, getting the bonus level about 30% of the time does line up with testing results from with 6 points in the skill.)

 

 

Clearly there is a +5% bonus for that ability, but as far as I can tell, it reads from the skill training level, but NOT from the basic stat connected to the ability. And it seems like that applies to other buff abilities that use the same attribute in the ability definitions for that 5% rate.

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Jeff - right, my bad; I meant Steel Discipline and not Lightning Discipline. I did kind of like exploiting this bug, but thanks for your feedback and the fix!

 

So while we've got your attention, on an unrelated note (but still on the topic of game mechanics feedback) - did you have a particular reason for removing the to-hit chance percentage feedback from the in-game "text box"? Removing this info from in-game data frankly seems like a step backwards.

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Just to be clear: 1) Does Intelligence have anything to do with turrets (per the tooltip)? 2) Does Turret Craft in fact do anything (other than add buffs)?

 

I haven't gotten to a retrainer yet, so it's a little difficult for me to experiment with this myself, but I will be messing with it when I get there (which may not be for a while).

 

EDIT: It appears that we have a whole thread going on the failure of turret mechanics to follow in-game descriptions. I've been avoiding reading most of the threads here because I want to avoid spoilers for a while yet.

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Kelandon - remember that you can simulate the in-game trainer character by pulling up Shift+D and typing "retrain." I've used that cheat myself for testing purposes, and it has exactly the same effects (and the same "attribute cycling" bug that's been reported earlier and described in detail by Slarty) as using the trainer character.

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When I strip and retrain my current game's Khalida, with 6 points in COTF skill, no points or specs in bottom tier (which has a buff duration bonus), and all stat points into Endurance, this gives her a strength of 8. COTF usually gives 3 levels of BF, and occasionally 4 levels. It NEVER gives 5 or 6 levels, even though this should happen at least 16% of the time, according to the logic above (with 3 independent 40% chances, at 8 Strength, to gain a point).

 

When I then retrain Khalida identically, except with all stat points into Strength, she has 22 Strength. That's a 110% bonus, in theory. However, the results of using the ability are identical: usually 3 levels of BF, occasionally 4 levels, never 5 or 6. Strength really does not appear to have any effect, if you isolate for it.

 

 

How about this? Save the first save into the upper left save slot. Save that second game in the save slot just below it. The locations of your saved games is given on the support page. Compress Save0 and Save1 and email them to support@spiderwebsoftware.com. I'll see what is going on.

 

- Jeff Vogel

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Thank you VERY much Mephisto for the saved games. When I have bug feedback like this, I can deal with bugs very efficiently.

 

I did indeed make a mistake. I did a bit of rebalancing over a year ago, and I forgot what I changed and why I changed it. Basically, I was trying to get status effects (especially high-impact ones like Battle Frenzy and Stun) under control. I didn't want the player to have infinite double turns or be hit by 10+ turn stuns. This was what was nagging at me when checking this. If you character has 20 strength and uses COTF, for example, strength would give an extra THREE bonus turns. I can't balance around that sort of power surge.

 

To keep these effects under control, I made them only be affected by your skill in the ability itself. Base stats like strength are reserved for affecting regular damage attacks. (So don't worry. Base stats are still very important.)

 

So, basically, the tooltip is wrong. I'll make the following changes.

 

1. Change "Based on" to "Improved by" for clarity.

2. Remove that message for abilities not affected by base stats.

 

Also, I'm still quite sure that int is helping to make turrets, but it's not helping enough. (As in, it takes 6-7 points of Int to get 1 level of turret). This isn't enough. So ...

 

3. Each point of int now has a 20% chance of giving the turret another level. (More powerful Tinkermages. That's what we needed. :-/ )

 

I hope this addresses these issues. I'm sorry for the unclear tooltips, and I'll make sure it's better in 1.0.1.

 

- Jeff Vogel

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Cool! Yeah, that rebalancing from last year definitely makes sense, and sounds like it was a great change to make.

 

One more note, Jeff: there are some buff abilities (well, at least one) that do receive an extra level per point of Int (and some portion of level), because they use the amount_per_level attribute (just like damaging abilities) instead of the percent_per_level attribute. Specifically, Charge Weapons does. It looks like it was intended to only last for 1 turn unless you put points into the skill, but instead, it lasts for 5 or more turns even if you don't increase your Intelligence or the skill, just from base Intelligence.

 

I think Tinkermages would still be the strongest class, even with the weaker version, because they could double their damage when it counts most. But it would make them less ridiculous, particularly at lower levels, if that were changed to what I think was intended.

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Charge Weapons is going to be rebalanced to be more in line with the other base level abilities.

 

Edit: Base duration will be average of 4.5 turns. Each level increases duration for 1.5 turns. For tinkermages using weapon-type attacks, one turn to get double effect for this period of time seems like a reasonable ability.

 

- Jeff Vogel

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I just went through every ability and made sure that each ability had an appropriate tag for base ability that affects it. I also buffed up a number of PC abilities to make them more tempting. (Though this will be a slight buff for enemies too, but nothing game-breaking.)

 

It nags me a little that the Blademaster's charge abilities go off of dexterity, but I'm leaving that for now.

 

- Jeff Vogel

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Edit: Base duration will be average of 4.5 turns. Each level increases duration for 1.5 turns. For tinkermages using weapon-type attacks, one turn to get double effect for this period of time seems like a reasonable ability.

 

- Jeff Vogel

 

If I'm reading this correctly, that still seems pretty OP. As with version 1.0, given the long duration of the skill (at character level 1 you'd get an average of 6 turns of the skill, while at level 30 you'd get 48 turns - even more than my Silena has now from my above example), you could just activate Charge Weapons before a battle, then have every attack do double damage after entering the next battle - including on the first turn. Or am I missing something? Either way, thanks for taking the time to consider feedback!

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I believe he's changing it to only get +levels from the skill itself, so it would just be a flat 4.5 turns, +1.5 turns per additional point in the Charge Weapons skill only. (Of course, you can still very much activate it before a battle begins with that system, so it's still extremely strong.)

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It's meant to be good. Otherwise, people won't bother to use it. Though I should check and make sure the cooldown is long enough. I wanted the tinkermage to feel powerful even in situations where turrets aren't working.

 

(And the example about of it giving 31 turns of duration is a perfect example of why I made base skills stop affecting status effects. Balancing that just became too ugly, especially when you factor in how it was effecting abilities of enemy bosses.)

 

- Jeff Vogel

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Thanks for the clarification - I also realized after I posted that it might in fact be 1.5 turns/skill level, not 1.5 turns/character level, which as you say is still very strong, but not nearly as insane as it's implemented currently. With these changes, my 1.0.1 playthrough would've probably seen me as a Tinkermage, Khalida, and Nathalie - Khalida hits COTF, I hit Charge Weapons, Nathalie does what Nathalie does, and enemies have a very bad day. Thanks again to Jeff for dropping by the forums and considering the feedback, and for a solid ending to the Avadon trilogy!

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