User:Raine Valen/Musings/Drawbacks

Some Underused Mechanics

Hi, Audience.

This post is won't be exceptionally interesting; it's just something that struck me when thinking of ways to balance skills.

See, most skills' effects are balanced around activation time, energy or adrenaline cost, and recharge. A few bring sacrifice into the mix, and that's about where the variety ends. However, there are a few exceptions, like "Easily interrupted". In my opinion, these additional balancing factors are severely underused, especially considering that energy, activation, and recharge are so limited ("this skill would be perfectly balanced at 8 energy, but we can't do that.").

So, with that in mind, I'll detail some of these additional balancing factors.

Easily Interrupted

The first I want to talk about is "easily interrupted". Easily interrupted is basically a way saying to a user, "We don't want you using this in peoples' faces." For example, take traps. In order to get traps off, you've got to either (a) fall back to use them, (b) use them when people aren't paying attention to you, or (c) use them while under means to prevent interruption (like block stances).

Now, there's this whole category of skills that would be so much more balanced if you couldn't use them while standing in peoples' faces. For example, take Blinding Surge. If bsurge were easily interrupted, air eles would have to apply significantly more thought to its application: at a moment's notice, they could have a non-blind warrior or assassin on them, and then find themselves unable to blind their attacker.

Similarly, take Attunements. They're so vital that eles will typically fall back (far) to cast these enchantments, lest they risk losing what's essentially their lifeblood. What if, instead of taking forever to cast, they took one second and were easily interrupted? Eles would still need to fall back to use them, but it wouldn't be such a timesink. What about oldschool Aegis? Do you see where I'm heading with this?

Other skills that I think would be much improved with the addition of "easily interrupted" include Empathy, Diversion, Critical Defenses, Barbed Signet, Apply Poison, and Gale. That's hardly an inclusive list, but I believe that that's enough to give you, Reader, an idea of how "easily interrupted" could be much more effectively used as a balancing mechanism.

Half-Range and Touch Range

Conversely, there are some skills that would be more balanced by FORCING you into peoples' faces to use them. Position IS a resource; why shouldn't skills use it as a cost?

By forcing the user of these skills into closer proximity, we (1) limit their users' effective range, (2) make the usage of these skills more obvious, and (3) make kiting a more effective counter.

Let me throw a couple of examples at you. Vampiric Touch would be simply outrageous at full spell range, but touch range makes it more than reasonable (in fact, it's reasonably bad outside of a particular gimmick). Imagine Zojun's Shot as a full-range skill, if you will, and you'll see how effective range limitations on skills are.

So what could we improve with this in mind? Well, off the top of my head, Ebon Hawk and Stoning. Earth, as an attribute, has more than enough means to accommodate a close-proximity ele, and these skills are downright abusive as they are now. Getting smacked with a Stoning from casting range for Heavy Blow damage is (pardon my French) bullshit. At half range? Not quite so much. What would you say, Reader, to a 5-energy, half-ranged Shield Guardian? How about Water Trident with 3-second knockdown? Oppressive Gaze? Shadow Shroud?

Half- and touch-range are great ways to balance skills' effects; why not apply them more?

Delayed Effect

Skills with effect delays promote the hell out of skilled play. Skills like Patient Spirit are good for the game. It gets kind of sketchy where damage-dealing skills are concerned, because they make it easy to compress damage (even though they are kind of a giveaway, especially when they're hexes), but delayed-action utility functions don't have that issue, and they add another level of predictive (and that means skilled) play.

I can't really give you an extensive list of examples with this one, but I'll give you a couple of samples of things that I've been considering:

5 1 3 Hex spell. After 1 second, target foe's skill is interrupted. Interruption effect: steal x Energy.

10 1 12 Hex spell. (3 seconds.) End effect: target foe loses an enchantment. Removal effect: deals 15...59...70 damage.

10 2 15 Spell. Affects foes near target foe's initial location. After 3 seconds, these foes are knocked down for 3 seconds. I (clearly) haven't put any time or effort into balancing any of the above, but that's not the point. I merely wanted to demonstrate some of the ways that delayed effects could affect gameplay.

Delayed effects promote teamwork and coordination, two things that are both good for the game.

Cannot Self-Target

This one's pretty self-explanatory, so I'll spare you the basics.

This one directly promotes teamwork which is, again, good for the game.

Lose All Energy/Adrenaline

While mostly a consideration for warrior and paragon skills, these adrenaline and/or energy loss are very, very effective ways to quickly cut pressure. If you'd like a good example, I recommend looking at a few of my Ronin's skills, most notably in the Budo line. Yes, I'm shamelessly promoting myself.

To use warriors as an example, though, losing all Energy means no Frenzy or Bull's for a while. Losing all Adrenaline means, typically, end of spike (or, more rarely, energy follow-up).

However, there's no reason to limit this to melee; it does the same thing pretty much anywhere. Well, obviously, adrenaline loss won't do much to professions not using adrenal skills, but you get the point.

Exhaustion

This is one of my favorite limiting mechanisms, and it saddens me that it's not used more often. Exhaustion is awesome because it creates a hard debt: you can use the skill now, but you'll pay for it later. The ability to have a skill available when you need it but with a limited usage frequency is an amazing balancing mechanism, and I'm actually saddened to see it limited to Elementalist skills (though I intend to use it for my Summoner's skills because it's so amazing) (oops, I did it again).

What if Wastrel's Collapse caused Exhaustion, but had a 10-second recharge? What if Wearying Strike caused Exhaustion instead of weakness?

The one thing that I don't like about Exhaustion, though, is that it's set to 10 points; for a lot of skills, fewer points would be better (Protector's Strike for 2-3 points of Exhaustion? Balances the hell out of Warrior's Endurance).

However, even with that considered, Exhaustion is still an extremely potent and versatile limit on skill usability.

"While Using This Skill"

Finally, there's this entire clause. Currently, I've only seen it as "You have -40 Armor while using this skill", but what if it could be used for other things?

If you'll look at my suggestion for Fleeting Stability, you'll get an idea of how a mechanic like this could be used, and the implications are, in my opinion, pretty amazing.

However, even with ONLY "you have -40 Armor while using this skill" taken into consideration, we're still given a strong balancing tool. It's like a Lite version of "easily interrupted"; it's basically telling you not to do it in peoples' faces, but with a different risk. Instead of simply not being able to do it, you risk exploding.

For "You have -40 Armor", I'd like to recommend Rodgort's Invocation, Lion's Comfort, Shadow Refuge (and self-heals in general, honestly), and Claim Resource (flame me). Among other things, of course.

In Conclusion:

Skills could do more stuff and it'd be neat.