Game Mechanics Simplifying Modifiers

[neoselket]

Getting a good modifier for a weapon or accessory can be annoyingly difficult. With so many negative, useless, and unnecessary modifiers, i decided to make a suggestion to simplify things.
Basically, the amount of modifiers would be drastically lowered, and each one would be more unique so as to encourage choosing different modifiers, rather than just going for the 'best' one.

Weapon modifiers:
Forceful: +15% knockback piercing(15% of enemies' knockback resistance is ignored, does not apply to bosses)
Zealous: +10% critical strike chance
Light: +15% attack speed, can now be applied to all weapons, not just swords
Ruthless: +20% damage
Bulky: -10% attack speed, +10% damage
Legendary: +5% damage, attack speed, and critical strike chance(only applies to melee weapons). Also gives +10% size to swords.
Unreal: +5% damage, attack speed, and critical strike chance(basically the same as legendary, but only applies to ranged weapons)
Mythical: +5% damage, attack speed, critical strike chance, and -5% mana cost(only applies to magic weapons)
Sighted: +5% chance to not consume ammo(ranged only)
Intense: +10% damage and mana cost(only applies to magic weapons)
Godly: +5% damage and knockback piercing

All negative modifiers would be removed, and instead the weapon would have a chance to just lose it's modifier altogether.

Accessory modifiers:

Warding: +4 defense
Menacing: +4% damage
Lucky: +4% critical strike chance
Quick: +4% movement speed
Violent: +4% attack speed
Healthy: +10 max life
Warm: slightly increased life regen(roughly +0.1 per second)
Intimidating: +5% sword size
Arcane: +20 mana
Obedient: +1 max minion(only ever gives 1 extra minion regardless of how many equipped accessories have this prefix)
Loaded: +4% chance to not consume ammo
Godly: +1% damage, critical strike chance, movement speed, attack speed, sword size, and chance to not consume ammo, as well as +1 defense and +5 mana

This way, there would be a reason to choose different modifiers depending on what weapon you have and what stat you want to maximize. Also, it would remove a lot of the annoying negative modifiers and modifiers that only give +1 to a stat. The result of this is that it would be a lot easier to get the modifier you want, but it would also not give such a large bonus to all stats, but rather a large bonus to one, or a small bonus to all of them.

Any suggestions, thoughts, or feedback of any kind would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Laluzi]

I'm not sure how I feel about changing weapon modifiers, both in removing the weaker ones and worsening the best ones - I think you've slimmed the variety too much. I certainly wouldn't mind tossing the purely bad ones, though they could be amusing, but I liked having more tradeoff options, and also more options among those options (like I might want +crit and +speed, but I could have chosen an option that went with more crit and less speed, or vice versa.) But those accessories are excellent. It's frustrating to have four of each stat modifier, and then have three of each be worse versions of the fourth. With the weapons, I did feel like there were different stats being balanced among some choices, even though some were clearly superior or inferior. The accessories just have way too many options for almost no variety.

I'm not sure Intimidating would work well (because size doesn't apply to many melee weapons), and Godly is slightly overpowered compared to the rest (4 godlies = 8 other accessories, which is a bit high for a jack of all trades deal), but I'd love some expanded accessory options, and these fit the bill nicely.

 

[BrusselSprouts693]

I'd like to keep the old modifiers in the code but not obtainable, just so servers can maintain.

 

[neoselket]

I'm not sure how I feel about changing weapon modifiers, both in removing the weaker ones and worsening the best ones - I think you've slimmed the variety too much. I certainly wouldn't mind tossing the purely bad ones, though they could be amusing, but I liked having more tradeoff options, and also more options among those options (like I might want +crit and +speed, but I could have chosen an option that went with more crit and less speed, or vice versa.) But those accessories are excellent. It's frustrating to have four of each stat modifier, and then have three of each be worse versions of the fourth. With the weapons, I did feel like there were different stats being balanced among some choices, even though some were clearly superior or inferior. The accessories just have way too many options for almost no variety.

I'm not sure Intimidating would work well (because size doesn't apply to many melee weapons), and Godly is slightly overpowered compared to the rest (4 godlies = 8 other accessories, which is a bit high for a jack of all trades deal), but I'd love some expanded accessory options, and these fit the bill nicely.

Thanks! Yeah, these definitely could use some balancing, and the stats mentioned are just rough guidelines subject to change. As for the accessories, I made intimidating give a weapon size bonus to compensate for the fact that most weapon modifiers no longer change that, so you can still have a bit of an increase, although it could definitely be cleaned up a bit. As for godly, it only gives a +1% bonus to all stats, so you could either have a 5% increase to each stat or a 20% increase to one stat, so it seems pretty balanced to me(though i'm clearly a bit biased). Thanks for the feedback!

I'd like to keep the old modifiers in the code but not obtainable, just so servers can maintain.

Good point. It might also be good for mapmakers. Alternatively, it could be an option during world generation or reforging so people could choose between the two systems.

 

[Laluzi]

Hm, yeah. Godly loses some of its power in that three of its bonuses are class-specific, meaning you're usually only going to get a 6:4 benefit. That's fair. (That said, there's some interesting balance among modifiers that I think, in probably a separate suggestion, should be retooled; going +4% movement speed against 4% crit or 4 defense is a choice you're only going to take if you're the spiritual successor of Sonic the Hedgehog and you absolutely must go fast, and x% crit will always(?) outperform x% damage unless you're a summoner. Some balancing among those numbers would also help these feel like actual choices.)

One possible solution to keeping the old modifiers in-engine is that weapons you buy, craft, loot, or get from enemies can have any of the existing modifiers, including the bad ones. However, when you take them to the NPC to reforge them, he can only give you the aforementioned 'good' modifiers.

 

[Empty air sandwich]

Not a total upgrade but I like the direction and it could be more fun and meaningful than before, definitely a neat idea to at least consider. Obviously the exact specifications are a working template and could still be changed around. Another thing that could be done is making the accessories (or maybe weapons too) have primary and secondary modifiers, both decided at once, with main effects being primary and less-important or separate ones like MovSpeed and other stuff like maybe weapon size or minion stuff or new things being secondary. So if you wanted this specific main thing for your character, you could still shoot for it plus whichever specific secondary thing you want as well, or stick with whichever secondary comes along that you're fine with. Would keep the entire system from being too meh after the change if that was the problem.

As is now, almost every weapon has simply 1 best modifier (that the wiki evolved to specify in the page of every weapon because that's the only one to look for) and the only other purpose is that without it you could bang it to at least make it a decent one, and every time I hear of accessory modifiers it's just "everything 4 DEF," sometimes "everything 4 Crit," all regardless of your character, except damage for summoner.
Going more like neo's system means you can "customize" weapons and accessories for the stats you actually wanna say you prefer for whatever you're doing with your character, and not only that but even while keeping your character's shtick the same you can decide to change your enchantments for something else that might be useful too, keeping several neat choices for that instead of just the 1 or the 2.

Keeping all of the old modifiers at least in code is a given because party/adventure maps/servers could be using them specifically for balancing.

One possible solution to keeping the old modifiers in-engine is that weapons you buy, craft, loot, or get from enemies can have any of the existing modifiers, including the bad ones. However, when you take them to the NPC to reforge them, he can only give you the aforementioned 'good' modifiers.

If I'm not understanding you wrong, it wouldn't really be fine, some of the old stuff could be uniquely useful/OP in comparison to the new reforge balancing so the proper way would be to try to get a weapon/accessory to naturally spawn with that exact modifier as you can't reforge for it. Downplays the entire system and would be too annoying. To work with the new system you probably shouldn't have the old ones appear (except for possibly the bad ones that need you to reforge it off, plus low-tier positive ones that are still downgrades of the reforges, if even any)

 

[Laluzi]

If I'm not understanding you wrong, it wouldn't really be fine, some of the old stuff could be uniquely useful/OP in comparison to the new reforge balancing so the proper way would be to try to get a weapon/accessory to naturally spawn with that exact modifier as you can't reforge for it. Downplays the entire system and would be too annoying. To work with the new system you probably shouldn't have the old ones appear (except for possibly the bad ones that need you to reforge it off, plus low-tier positive ones that are still downgrades of the reforges, if even any)

I say that with the assumption that the legendary/mythical/unreal modifiers are either unchanged or nerfed, and the effect is still uniform - like you couldn't find a legacy Legendary that's better than anything you could reforge now. (Though I'm still not sold on the top-tier nerf... a part of me wants to say make that the jack-of-all-trades reforge and then have others spec higher in particular mixed areas.) The idea is that the ones you can find can have bad/mediocre/good reforges, and you can only reforge good (or possibly mediocre) reforges. If one of the legacy, quasi-inaccessible reforges was better than any of the new reforges, it'd reflect a failure to cover a niche in the new system. It's just a backwards-compatibility way to keep the old modifiers in the system so that existing weapons don't need to be auto-rerolled.

With the existing modifiers, legendary, mythical, unreal, ruthless, and light are the only ones people reforge for in nearly all cases. (Demonic/Godly for ones where Legendary/Unreal/Mythical can't apply, Rapid for some very low-damage-high-speed guns.)

 

[Mental Mouse]

Agreed that the modifiers could use more tradeoffs, and especially class variations. The way that each weapon has a "natural best" modifier is not great, especially since for all but the most expensive, you hardly need to settle even for second-best unless you're poor, and poor is fixable. I'll note that the number of modifiers does affect how costly it is to reforge to a given modifier -- notably, the weaker accessory modifiers make it more costly to force a +4% modifier or picked stat boost.

Perhaps the most powerful modifiers could have penalties -- for example, increasing enemy attention. It's hard to do that properly though, for example penalizing off-class stats fails because you can just swap weapons.