Tiny Heroes combat system in Off Topic

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Jun 7 2011, 7:02 pm
Tiny Heroes is an action-platform game I'm working on. I want to include some light RPG elements. The purpose of the RPG elements is to let you customize your character so that two different characters give you different gameplay experiences. This lets you tailor the game to your preferences to make it more enjoyable, it also gives you a reason to play through it multiple times.

I want to do this without making things too complex. You'll have items and stats, but you won't go crazy trying to figure out the optimal way to allocate points in skill trees.

Combat Math

Here's an overview of how the combat math will work:

Mobs have four stats: power, speed, mind, and armor. Each attack has a constant damage value that's a weighted sum of those stats (the first three of them, at least). For example, a wizard's attack might deal (2*mind) damage while an assassin's attack might deal (power+speed) damage. The sum of the coefficients will generally be 2 (like it is in those examples), but a strong attack (with a longer cooldown or higher mana cost) might deal (3*power+speed) damage.

The randomness is introduced by armor. Each attack's damage is reduced by a random value between (armor) and (2*armor). Because the lower bound of the random value is your armor value, armor gives you some guaranteed reduction in damage.

If the enemy's armor value is greater than the damage done, they'll take zero damage. If it's less than the damage done, you're guaranteed to do at least one point of damage. This way you can tell the difference between an enemy you can't kill yet (because their armor is so high) and bad luck (when they keep rolling high values for damage reduction).

I'm not sure how I want to handle non-physical damage. I don't know if I want to consider damage physical or magical, or if I want to have separate elements. The math would work the same way except a resistance stat would be used in place of armor. I think having separate elements allows for more interesting things. For example, a player can do an optional quest to get a fire resist item, which comes in handy later. If all magic damage is resisted by the same stat, you just have to get one "magic resist" item and you're set.

Stat Growth and Items

I'm not entirely sure how stat growth will work. I like the idea of having the player accumulate stat points which they can distribute however they'd like, but I often don't like the way it works in games. I wouldn't want the allocation to be permanent, but if it can be changed, it's less meaningful. Players will also be able to equip items to increase their stats.

The reason I'd want to go with letting the player allocate stat points is that the player chooses major and minor classes. My plan is that you pick a major class, then part-way through the game you pick a minor class. If your stats grew in a way based on your class, being an assassin-knight would be better than assassin-wizard because, while you're an assassin, your stats will grow in a way that doesn't benefit wizard abilities.

I'm almost convinced to go this route and have a way for players to reallocate all stat points, I just need a way to limit how often or when that can be done. I wouldn't want a player going all power/speed because assassin is their major class, then reallocate to speed/mind once they take wizard as a minor class.

My Concerns

1. Because the damage reduction is rand(armor, 2*armor), the damage you take varies more as your armor stat gets higher. I'm not sure I like this. I suppose I could use a non-uniform distribution and call the unlikely event that the damage is only reduced by (armor) a critical hit, but then I probably wouldn't like how this works when the numbers are smaller.

2. I'm concerned that it'll only be well-balanced for attacks where the sum of the coefficients is 2. Attacks with higher coefficients will be guaranteed to do significantly more damage. I can try to balance this out by making their mana cost and cooldown greater, but I would've done that anyway.

3. Initially, before I had thought of the system defined here, I had decided that I wanted to have a way that some enemies will just be invincible to you. This system sort of accommodates that. When the enemy's armor value is greater than the damage you're doing, you can't deal any damage to them. The problem is that this is specific to one attack. You might have one ability with a higher damage value that can hurt the enemy but your weaker ability doesn't do anything. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

Questions

1. Is it too simple?

2. Do you have any suggestions?
#1 Jun 7 2011, 10:35 pm (Edited on Jun 7 2011, 10:48 pm)
Good post, I have a few suggestions.

1. Is it too simple?

Maybe not too simple, but it's kind of set in stone. I would like to see more room for 'surprises', such as 'critical hits' or 'dodging', even if those are only superficial elements. I also think it's better if attacks didn't have a constant potency, it just seems too mathematical (in a shallow way). I think you should allow for a range of possible damage points per ability, maybe something dependent on the coefficients like [2*min{mind,power},2*max{mind,power}].

The problem is that this is specific to one attack. You might have one ability with a higher damage value that can hurt the enemy but your weaker ability doesn't do anything. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

I think this is a good idea which could allow for interesting encounters. Think a strong, glass monster, that is invincible (reflects?) most attacks, but has few hit points. Players would need to think of ways to cross the 'invincibility threshold' and activate a strong enough ability such that the monster is actually damaged (status effects? combos?), which is more interesting than a situation where just any attack would work.

Another thing. You seem to have only one 'mind' attribute, which may make wizards overpowered, as they only need to care about one attribute for damage, whereas say, an assassin needs to spend points on two different attributes. To see why this is bad, consider the three seemingly equally powerful abilities: mind*3, power*1.5+speed*1.5,speed*3. Clearly at least one of the latter two will be less effective for an assassin than mind*3 is for a wizard, no matter the attribute distribution. This also makes it tempting to play a 'pure' wizard rather than multiclass (an assassin-wizard needs to have mind, power AND speed to be effective, for example). This is why a lot of RPGs make attribute effects interdependent, and try to avoid a linear relationship between attributes and abilities.
#2 Jun 8 2011, 4:15 am
Toadfish wrote:
Maybe not too simple, but it's kind of set in stone. I would like to see more room for 'surprises', such as 'critical hits' or 'dodging', even if those are only superficial elements.

I hadn't thought about how that would work. I'd like to make use of the same stats, so maybe I can have random events like that for each stat. Power gives you a chance to just absorb the damage, speed gives you a chance for a critical hit, mind gives you a chance to absorb a magic attack. I'll have to think about this more.

Another thing that I'm not sure if I like is having damage inflicted to the player by touching an enemy. I'm not sure how this would fit in with dodging because damage would be dealt every tick for as long as you're touching the enemy. Maybe you just can't dodge this damage.

I also think it's better if attacks didn't have a constant potency, it just seems too mathematical (in a shallow way). I think you should allow for a range of possible damage points per ability, maybe something dependent on the coefficients like [2*min{mind,power},2*max{mind,power}].

I want to keep it simple so the player can easily see "pumping up power makes these abilities more effective, while pumping up speed makes those abilities more effective". I see the benefit that having damage ranges could have, but at the same time I like this simplicity. I like being able to display to the player, "this ability does 15 damage and that one does 20 damage". Though, this would help to manage the last problem you pointed out (pumping up just one stat gives you a good max damage, but a poor min damage).

Another thing. You seem to have only one 'mind' attribute, which may make wizards overpowered, as they only need to care about one attribute for damage, whereas say, an assassin needs to spend points on two different attributes. To see why this is bad, consider the three seemingly equally powerful abilities: mind*3, power*1.5+speed*1.5,speed*3. Clearly at least one of the latter two will be less effective for an assassin than mind*3 is for a wizard, no matter the attribute distribution.

I hadn't thought about that but I think I can deal with it. I plan to have every class make use of two stats, but right now necromancers are mind/power and druids are mind/speed, so I'm not sure what wizards would be. I like that your stat allocation will make some abilities more powerful and leave other ones being not as powerful, but I guess I need to be sure there's no easy way to just pump up one stat and end up with a very effective character.
#3 Jun 8 2011, 4:31 am
I think it's weird how speed affects damage. Speed should have to do with how fast something happens. If the skills in the game have cooldowns, make speed reduce the cooldown time of your spells, or possibly make a character move faster/jump higher.
#4 Jun 8 2011, 5:21 am
EmpirezTeam wrote:
I think it's weird how speed affects damage. Speed should have to do with how fast something happens.

KE = 1/2*m*v*v amirite?
The same reason why the smaller round of an M16 can penetrate most types of body armor whereas the bigger round of the AK47 cannot?

Back on topic...
I don't like how the armor damage reduction works. Something like that is very very difficult to scale and balance. There are two main types of damage in how it's dealt in most RPGs and MMORPGs: Burst Damage and Constant DPS. Burst Damage is a large amount of damage dealt over a small period of time (traditionally one or two hits with a relatively long delay). Constant DPS is traditionally a constant rate of damage from frequent blows that deal an average amount of damage each.
Whenever you have damage reduction that works like this, the total amount of damage blocked is much higher against frequent blows than infrequent blows.
This could make characters who make frequent attacks (like rogues or monks) neigh worthless compared to characters who make hard but slow attacks (like two-handed weapon warriors or casters).

Don't neglect design work and concepts from other games in the genre. Don't copy them, of course, but there is a lot of data out there about how well different armor systems and whatnot work in the game and in the metagame.
#5 Jun 8 2011, 6:22 am
D4RK3 54B3R wrote:
KE = 1/2*m*v*v amirite?
The same reason why the smaller round of an M16 can penetrate most types of body armor whereas the bigger round of the AK47 cannot?

Because we're talking about guns, bullets and body armor.

Thinking realistically, the faster you punch, or in this case stab ( assassin's attack ), you would inflict less damage. If you know anything about boxing, one easy way to knock someone out is by swinging your arm, twisting your waist and punching directly on the side of your opponents face near the jaw and cheek( this makes your opponent's head jerk which causes his brain to collide with the skull resulting in KO ). This takes longer than say, a quick jab, but it's also more powerful. I said all that to say that speed would make your attacks less effective which makes it kind of weird to have it affecting damage in the first place.

I don't know of any game in which speed affects how much damage you do. This is most likely because it doesn't make sense to relate speed to power. Speed should determine how fast you move, how often you dodge, how fast you can use skills etc. It's like making defense determine how much damage you inflict with spells - see how one has nothing to do with the other?

Players are going to be confused when they start to play and see that speed is actually something that makes your attacks stronger. I would know since players were confused as to why in Empirez, my RTS from a while back, they weren't moving faster as their speed stat increased ( it was mainly because I didn't know how to control the speed of mobs ).
#6 Jun 8 2011, 6:24 am
Whenever you have damage reduction that works like this, the total amount of damage blocked is much higher against frequent blows than infrequent blows.

I think it'll be fine because its not a pure action RPG. You're not standing in front of an enemy, hitting it with your sword over and over again for a minute. You're not carefully selecting weapons for their high or low weapon speed. When you're "in combat" you'll spend a lot of time moving around to avoid attacks or to line up your own hits. I don't think that people will think of things in terms of damage per second.

The reason for having stats and damage is to make some enemies more powerful than others. In a platformer like Mario you use the same attack on any enemy and it has the same effect (generally one hit kills). You never think "uh oh, the enemies here are too strong for me", they're all the same.

Being able to customize your stats will let you make certain skills more effective, but the reason isn't to maximize your dps. The player will have to increase their damage just to be able to kill enemies as they reach higher level areas. It also let's you power up the abilities you like to use. If you hate melee abilities, you'd allocate stats to improve your ranged attacks.
#7 Jun 8 2011, 6:38 am
EmpirezTeam wrote:
I don't know of any game in which speed affects how much damage you do. This is most likely because it doesn't make sense to relate speed to power. Speed should determine how fast you move, how often you dodge, how fast you can use skills etc.

First of all, as soon as you assign numbers to damage realism is going out the window. I'm not interested in what speed actually does, im interested in how these three stats can work together to create a balanced combat system that scales well as the stats increase. Instead of power, speed, and mind we can call them X, Y, and Z.

The idea is rather loosely based on World of Warcraft. I haven't played recently so I don't know if this is still how it works, but different classes would get attack power from different stats. Warriors got AP from strength only, rogues got it from strength and agility.

There will be ways to increase your movement speed and maybe reduce cooldowns, but these would be class abilities. Having assassin as your major or minor class will increase your movement speed. I wouldn't want it based on stats because it's hard for the player to make intelligent use of that - how do you compare the value of damage done vs. faster movement speed? The major/minor class selections are how you pick what abilities you will (and will not) have. I see movement speed as more of am ability than as the natural product of your stat allocation. It let's me design maps and say "only an assassin can run fast enough to make this jump."
#8 Jun 8 2011, 6:57 am (Edited on Jun 8 2011, 7:04 am)
EmpirezTeam wrote:
Thinking realistically, the faster you punch, or in this case stab ( assassin's attack ), you would inflict less damage. If you know anything about boxing, one easy way to knock someone out is by swinging your arm, twisting your waist and punching directly on the side of your opponents face near the jaw and cheek( this makes your opponent's head jerk which causes his brain to collide with the skull resulting in KO ). This takes longer than say, a quick jab, but it's also more powerful. I said all that to say that speed would make your attacks less effective which makes it kind of weird to have it affecting damage in the first place.

So now you're talking about force impulse with punches (because obviously a straight stays connected to your opponent for longer than a jab). Applying more physics, force impulse = linear momentum = mass * velocity. There's really no way of getting around it.


Anyhow, in response to Forum_account:
There's a reason why most RPGs don't have excessive hard damage reduction. Most RPGs go with either % chance to negate damage(miss, dodge, block, parry, what have you) or % damage reduced. The reason is that it denies too much damage from DPS characters for it to be balanced. Effectively, one item will make an entire category of characters in the game worthless.

This reminds me of a talk from Warren Spector about Deus Ex from years and years ago. He said something along the lines of "Players enjoy the metagame and they enjoy their fantasies about their character." He was talking about this in the context of character progression, because there were a number of seemingly worthless attributes and skills (augmentations) that still contributed to the overall game. Putting points into swimming and getting the aqualung augmentation allowed players to fulfill the fantasy of being aquaman, even though neither of those things contributed to the primary focii of the game (stealth and action).

So let's imagine me trying to outfit an assassin-type character. What do assassins wear? Light armor. What do they wield? Some use ranged weapons, some use daggers. Let's say I went with a melee assassin type character that's supposed to be fast with daggers to fulfill my fantasy of being an assassin.

Additionally, It's unavoidable that someone will try to min/max their combat effectiveness. If putting on big plate armor and a big sword lets someone sit still and take blows and only attack when the enemy comes close just so they can dish out more damage faster, it will be done.

If weapon speed doesn't do anything, how is an ultramobile assassin-type character supposed to battle the unmovable knight character aforementioned? When the assassin gets in range, both characters attack equally fast. So it's not unreasonable to assume that both characters will deal damage to eachother.
You could reason that my superior speed should allow me to dictate the battle by flanking and retreating and darting and whatnot. Darting from the front is worthless because he has more armor than I do, so I have to score more hits on him than he can score on me. Thus I have to flank him, but wait! Jumping over him or navigating the environment to get to his rear takes longer than it takes him to turn around!

It is impossible for me to score a hit on him without him scoring a hit on me when weapon delay is not a factor in combat.

So if I'm wearing light armor, melee is completely futile for me, destroying the fantasy I would have liked to play in your game.
Something like that will put people off from playing your game, citing bad balance.
#9 Jun 8 2011, 7:25 am
If there's really anything to compare your vision of combat to, it's fighting style games (street fighter or mortal kombat or whatever) because positioning and jumping is similar to that of platformers. You primary move along the terrain and you can jump upwards.

IainPeregrine, many many years ago, lamented about how his fighting platformer game devolved into nothing but a boring button-spamming fest. You won fights by cornering someone and then spamming the punch key or the kick key.
But then after, he blogged about fixing the problem. By making attacks push the enemy and the attacker away from eachother, the frequency at which players could hit eachother was lowered. This change alone resulted in the need for good timing and reflexes, since each hit mattered that much more.

If you watch competitive level games of Street Fighter, you'll notice that players take advantage of the time it takes to attack in order to launch a counter attack. If it takes you a second to swing your sword in my direction, I can anticipate the sword swing and use that time to get around you and hit you from a direction that the sword doesn't affect.

Weapon Speed and Attack Frequency can make or break games. By ignoring weapon speed, you're going to have people loading on armor and waiting for opponents with lesser-equipment to come close for a key-spamming fest.
#10 Jun 8 2011, 7:30 am
If weapon speed doesn't do anything, how is an ultramobile assassin-type character supposed to battle the unmovable knight character aforementioned? When the assassin gets in range, both characters attack equally fast. So it's not unreasonable to assume that both characters will deal damage to eachother.
It is impossible for me to score a hit on him without him scoring a hit on me when weapon delay is not a factor in combat.

You're still making it sound like two mobs will walk up to each other and spam melee attacks until the other drops dead. Most attacks will be special abilities and weapon speed wouldn't be an issue.

I'm not concerned about making this work for pvp yet. I want assassins and knights to be equally effective in pve, but I don't mind if the knight would slaughter the assassin in pvp.

Additionally, It's unavoidable that someone will try to min/max their combat effectiveness. If putting on big plate armor and a big sword lets someone sit still and take blows and only attack when the enemy comes close just so they can dish out more damage faster, it will be done.

I don't think I'll have such big discrepancies in armor value as traditional RPGs might. Again, the purpose of stats is more for the growth. I can have powerful enemies that kill you in one hit, but after you level up and get better armor you can survive just fine. It's more to limit the player's access to content, not to say "knights get 60% damage reduction from armor, wizards get 15%"

If you want to think of this in terms of WoW-like mechanics, the difference is that in WoW, every character can grind by themselves but only has one role in a team when doing an instance. Here, every character can solo an instance. The differences in armor and damage output across classes will be less significant because every characyet will need to take hits and deal damage. The difference in gameplay comes from the abilities you have, but they all ultimately have to serve the same purpose.
#11 Jun 8 2011, 7:36 am
I'm talking about WoW-like mechanics because they apply to almost every category of videogames. Starcraft 2 is a game that uses a similar armor system to what you've described, but it's a strategy game, not an RPG. DPS is frequently used in evaluation and analysis of potential army unit compositions in Starcraft 2. It doesn't make a difference that there are units in that game that can teleport around, in and out of range. It doesn't make a difference that there are units in that game that can burrow underground or retreat to avoid damage. Mobility does not affect this at all; The average damage dealt per second is still a valid statistic with which to derive an analysis.

Using armor to limit content the way you're describing is fine. There's nothing wrong with that.

But if you care about competitive play or PvP at all, your proposed systems for armor and for combat could break the game for many players.
#12 Jun 8 2011, 7:55 am
D4RK3 54B3R wrote:
So now you're talking about force impulse with punches (because obviously a straight stays connected to your opponent for longer than a jab). Applying more physics, force impulse = linear momentum = mass * velocity. There's really no way of getting around it.

What I described was a hook, not a straight. I guess you really don't know anything about boxing. You can keep typing your science, but when you find a mixed martial artist that will tell you a jab is more powerful than a hook, let me know.

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~dee3/punches.html

Read the "Hook" section. It basically says everything I said in more detail.

Forum_account wrote:
The idea is rather loosely based on World of Warcraft. I haven't played recently so I don't know if this is still how it works, but different classes would get attack power from different stats. Warriors got AP from strength only, rogues got it from strength and agility.

Those classes get bonuses in attack via agility because they are classes that are meant for you to invest in agility ( rogues, assassins etc. are always the fast stealthy character in games and usually require a high stat in agility to equip certain items ), not because agility is basically "power" just with a different name.

Forum_account wrote:
I wouldn't want it based on stats because it's hard for the player to make intelligent use of that - how do you compare the value of damage done vs. faster movement speed?

It seems that it would also be hard to make intelligent use of your current idea. What would make an assassin want to invest in power over speed ( because your above example shows they both come into play when the assassin makes an attack ) If power and speed are both just attack, wouldn't an assassin with 3 power and 5 speed do the same amount of damage as a player with 5 power and 3 speed? It's kind of silly. In Warcraft, speed also has affect on DPS. This is what I'm talking about - an actual reason to invest in speed. So now the player can decide if he wants to do slower attacks with more power, or faster attacks with less power.
#13 Jun 8 2011, 7:59 am
Mobility makes less of a difference in Starcraft because it doesn't really let you avoid damage, at least not completely. Your zealots with increased movement speed will take less damage as they get in melee range of a ranged attacker, but they're not using their mobility to jump out of the way of bullets.

In a platformer there's that easy way to avoid damage. You can do the math to figure out that a fireball attack does 100 damage per second, but if the enemies jump over all of your fireballs you're doing 0 dps. You can't predict how many attacks in Tiny Heroes will hit, so there's really no way to figure what your dps would be.

I think the problem with pvp is that it unless the environment is very small and restricted, it would be too hard to land a hit. PvP Mario is called Mario Cart because trying to jump on the other player's head would just be annoying. Go carts are more fun. I haven't thought about pvp much, but I figure the goal wouldn't just be to kill the other player.
#14 Jun 8 2011, 8:04 am
EmpirezTeam wrote:
It seems that it would also be hard to make intelligent use of your current idea. What would make an assassin want to invest in power over speed ( because your above example shows they both come into play when the assassin makes an attack ) If power and speed are both just attack, wouldn't an assassin with 3 power and 5 speed do the same amount of damage as a player with 5 power and 3 speed?

One ability's damage might be (power + speed), another might be (1.5*power + 0.5*speed), another might be (2*speed). The way you allocate stat points will make a difference.

Suppose your melee abilities are based more on power and your ranged abilities are based more on speed. If you prefer using ranged attacks you allocate more points to speed.
#15 Jun 8 2011, 8:09 am (Edited on Jun 8 2011, 8:16 am)
EmpirezTeam, the difference between a straight and a hook are negligible in the context. The faster your fist is going, the greater the force impulse and the more kinetic energy is going to be transferred to the target. The difference between a jab and a straight or a hook is the duration of the impulse, which is STILL affected by the velocity of your fist.


Forum_account, in EVE Online, weapons tracking is based upon the angular velocity of the gun turret. If your position's angular velocity relative to the aggressor is greater than the gun tracking speeds, then they will most likely miss. To account for this, players evaluate DPS as a curve that takes hit/miss with tracking speeds and ranges into account.
If you miss your target, that means you won't be dealing damage to your target for the next X seconds. DPS is just total damage dealt over duration of the fight, so the DPS is lower if you miss. It's still a good indicator of combat effectiveness.
#16 Jun 8 2011, 8:31 am
If my game is deemed "not fun" by the three people in the world who would study the game mechanics to find the probability of an attack landing so they can compute their effective dps, I'm ok with that :-)

I think that most people will come to the same conclusion whether they think about it in such depth or not. Even the most casual player can realize "I have terrible luck landing hits with ranged attacks, I'll boost my melee damage." I just want to be sure that the system can be balanced enough to allow for these kinds of choices to be possible and viable, rather than being dictated to you by the numbers (ex: this is your highest damage ability, so allocate all stat points this way and mash that attack).
#17 Jun 8 2011, 8:35 am
I think we're talking about different types of speed here.

I'm referring to how long it actually takes to execute the attack. A jab is quick, weaker than other punches, but will usually make contact. A hook takes longer to perform, but will inflict more damage and will KO an opponent more often than a jab will if it connects.

I took physical science so there is no need to explain velocity to me. I know that an object moving faster would do more damage, but as I said in my first response to you, I wasn't talking about guns, bullets, or any projectile. I was talking about an assassin making an attack. But this all doesn't matter anyway because Forum_account said he isn't concerned with being realistic so meh.

Forum_account wrote:
Suppose your melee abilities are based more on power and your ranged abilities are based more on speed. If you prefer using ranged attacks you allocate more points to speed.

That makes sense then. I didn't know skills had different damage formulas - I thought the (power+speed) was for everything the Assassin does. I think that is also how Maplestory works. I just thought you had speed there and expected the players to just distribute points into it without there being an actual benefit to putting it into speed as opposed to strength.
#18 Jun 8 2011, 10:52 am (Edited on Jun 8 2011, 11:04 am)
Forum_account wrote:
If my game is deemed "not fun" by the three people in the world who would study the game mechanics to find the probability of an attack landing so they can compute their effective dps, I'm ok with that :-)

As usual, you've seemingly intentionally missed or ignored the points I've been making.

I'm going to lay it out for you:
1. DPS is easy to compute and is a valid statistic in all game genres. DPS doesn't NEED probability of an attack landing; it only needs total damage dealt and duration of combat.
2. Weapon delays and skill delays are essential for satisfying gameplay that does not devolve into button mashing. Additionally, weapon delays and skill delays give another attribute that can be tuned to contribute to balance.
3. If the game uses weapon delays and skill delays, your armor system favors weapons and skills that deal burst damage rather than weapons and skills that deal consistent DPS. This could result in a entire categories of characters becoming obsolete in PvP and PvE, since it sounds like damage is computed the same way in both situations. Though admittedly, PvE is much easier to tweak to avoid obsolescence of character archetypes.

Crunching DPS to min/max is not a point I am trying to make or push. I am saying that it is unavoidable.
Instead, I am using the term DPS to explain two ways in which damage can be dealt: Slow and Big, Fast and Small.


I think your use of armor as a "content limiter" is more or less standard stuff in RPG design, but there are other armor systems that do not completely screw over Fast and Small attacks while still accomplishing the same task of limiting content.
#19 Jun 8 2011, 12:22 pm (Edited on Jun 8 2011, 12:29 pm)
I think both D4RK3 and Forum_account have been missing each others' points. D4RK3's discussion about the potential imbalance with the armor system is insightful and already well-summarised, so I won't go over that. However, the point Forum_account seems to be making is that traditional RPG statistics are not as significant in his game. Talking about PvP, If combat is centred on actually landing hits, then small and fast abilities would be easier to use than big and slow abilities, even if they are statistically less effective. In order to make a "big and slow" attack count, a player would need to cleverly get his opponent into a situation where the attack can hit him in the first place. I think you've played Diablo 2, Darke, so you'll undoubtedly have encountered this situation with Blizzard Sorcerer builds. By raw potential, Blizzard Sorcerers deal maybe the most damage out of all classes, but they are completely ineffective in PvP, which is centred on mobility.

Now, there are a few problems with our discussion of DPS here. There are two different statistics we're calling DPS in this discussion:
1. (Damage dealt over time) divided by (time) - as measured by logging actual combat.
2. (Potential damage dealt over time), divided by (time).
The difference is that the first is a statistic whereas the second is just a "statistic". In some games, like aforementioned WoW, the second type of DPS almost directly influences the first. However, in games such as Diablo, even with highly accurate calculations taking into account mobility and whatnot, the second type will, at least for certain builds, not reliably predict the first in PvP. At this point, we can only argue about the second, hypothetical kind of DPS, but it's worthwhile to keep in mind that this will not, eventually, allow much insight into how the game will actually play.

With that said, I would have to agree with Darke that the armor system needs more depth. He does have a point, at least regarding potential DPS - which is all we have to go by right now. But, I think doing things by percentage is not the way to go, as I do like the idea of certain enemies being invincible to "weak" attacks, or such things, and the opportunities this opens. Perhaps this is better handled through a different mechanic, however.
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