Best posts made by Brueson

Hello devs. I just had my first session in alpha and I am loving what I see so far. The game feels smooth and crafting is enjoyable. I like the informative tooltips and hope all aspects of the stats get more love. One thing I love about Torchlight is the tooltips show exactly what affects the skill and the final number given all the stats.

One thing I hope changes though are the arbitrary skill restrictions. By this I mean each skill can be locked away just because of armor type. I get some attacks should require a certain weapon, but even those should be as free as possible.

As it stands now, it feels like there are essential three classes in a class-less system; light armor, medium armor, and heavy armor. This makes me feel like I can't really make unique characters. I get a choice of one of the three armor classes, and then have to pick synergies from a restricted list.

What I would like to see are trade-offs for using skills that are currently locked by armor. Such as stealth skill requires light armor. If I put one heavy armor piece on, like a helm, bam no more stealth. Instead, what about modifying your stealth stat based on armor. If I have 100 stealth, putting on a helm could reduce it to 95. Putting on fullplate chest would reduce it to 50. This would make it much easier for me to be spotted, but it would be my choice.

For casting spells, instead of saying no, there could be other trade-offs. Casting a spell in full heavy armor could increase the mana cost and/or increase the cooldown.

Again, I love what I am seeing so far. I just hope we get more freedom with skills in the future.

I was just thinking, trade-offs I listed are penalties. Instead, what about bonuses for different armor types to add flare instead of negatives. This could be based on the skill and not just in general.

Example:
Magic Missile
Heavy Armor - Chance to finish spell even if interrupted.
Medium Armor - Higher chance to crit
Light Armor - Channel speed increased

Stealth
Heavy Armor - Cannot be crit while stealthed
Medium - Perception is higher while stealth (stealth hunters)
Light Armor - Increased movement while stealthed

A choice presents itself to you. You have no information for either direction. As an adventurer, which way do you choose to go?

There are many reasons to keep hunger going at a normal pace no matter what.

• It is one less thing to code
• Towns will be sieged and food usage could matter
• Not all towns will have easy access to food, and as such will be encouraged to trade with a farming town
• If you want to semi afk chat with your friends, do so in a tavern/bar and make an evening of it, eating and drinking in game too
• Resource sinks can be very healthy for the game
• It is currently very easy to stockpile food, and if you are in town, you won't be far from a chest full of it
  • If food spoils in future iterations of the game, then it could be more bothersome, but probably wouldn't be that bad
• If you are afk, you won't be needing to move around and can quickly eat something to jump into any random pvp
• It is one less thing to code, break, and be exploited

As you round the corner, your footing falters as you slip on the wet sloped stone. It is just enough slope that you slide for a while before catching on a loose brick on the wall. Righting yourself on the edge that is dry, you are able to make your way down the rest of the slope at your own pace. It leads past a door, but abruptly ends at a wall that looks like an afterthought. Your attention turns to the door, it is locked. The lock appears rusted on the outside, which can be expected for an old place this humid.

You could turn back, but reckon it would be easier to find a way through the door than fight your way back up the slope. What do you choose to do?

Grind is very subjective. I define it as doing something many times you don't want to do to achieve something unrelated to the task.

Grind Example: Kill 1000 orcs to level up to get the next armor crafting tier. The journey didn't drop crafting materials, and you don't care about killing orcs.

Maybe not Grind: Kill 1000 orcs to raise your faction with these NPCs that hate orcs. You wrote your backstory that you hate orcs and you really want the highest ranking with this faction.

There is a fine line to walk between offering reward for time spent to make the achievement worth it and arbitrarily inflating the requirements to the point of not being fun. Everyone draws this line in a different spot.

If you want to understand the wolf, you must study it. If it has an ability you want to learn, you must interact with it, and possibly kill it in multiple ways. The reward is you get the skill at the end. The fighting rewards the skill. The journey makes sense. This should help reduce the feeling of the grind as the journey matches the reward.

It is also said that you will only need to do a fraction of the progress to unlock the skills the creature has. At that point the skill is competitive if you want to use the skill. To level it up past tier 1 requires more investment, but the bonuses will be minor improvements.

Just have area loot. Clicking on any corpse brings them all up in a reasonable radius. Then outline the things in red and slightly visual border (for a11y) for things that would be negative karma. Confirmation dialogue configurable before commiting the negative karma.

Really not that complicated. I would be surprised if they haven't already planned this out. Single click top layer detection is quick to code, relatively. Next step will just take a little bit more to code. I just hope area loot has a few setting for those of us that want to pre-filter negative karma items.

It would raise the barrier of entry. If newbies can't ask for help, they will just leave and never come back. If they don't leave, then they leave the game world to look online for the info. The hardcore players will then have an advantage since they live in discord already.

On a flipside, you should get knowledge points for adding information to an in-game wiki, so players don't ever have to leave the game. Information should flow more easily, not other way around. Anything to keep people in the game and immersed.

Then, players could add info signs that link directly to the in-game wiki page that would help players the most.