Mines Malingerer
Posts: 53
Joined: Sunday, 6th November 2011, 00:30
Lets Talk About Demonspawn (Again)
1. The class still has serious balance issues. Despite some very timely and effective balances to the class some facets are blatantly and almost universally better/worse.
Ice: The worst offender, I think everybody will agree. As a tier2 facet this is wildly overpowered compared even to the T3 fire facet, let alone mediocre T2s like Spiny.
Antennae: Claws are highly situational. Hooves and horns are nice if generally underwhelming. Antennae are almost always universally better than any of them. Enemy radar and Sinv are almost always going to be preferable except in cases of hyperspecialized unarmed characters. Good work on solving the hats issue at least.
Magic Mapping: Does anybody really like this? Yes it could hypothetically be of use, but if Ds is indeed a challenge class as everybody protests then it offers experienced players little comparative benefit.
Another idea I had bouncing around would be an additional tier 1.5. Basically a tier for really mechanically awful, underpowered skills that would mostly just add flavor. It would be fun for adding extra character to your Ds.
2. Demonspawn have a spastic difficulty curves. Some people complain that Ds are too weak, some complain that they're too strong, and as far as I can tell they're both. A character that might be slightly more threatening than a 3 legged puppy in the early game can quickly turn into an unstoppable killdozer as the game progresses. Possible solutions for this could be weighting mutations more heavily towards the early/mid levels (might exacerbate 3), raising aptitudes (balance nightmare), or giving DS faster leveling in exchange for worse stat growth.
3. Currently Demonspawns encourage scumming. I'm not here to debate whether this is a good practice, or whether we should shake our fingers and cluck our tongues at people who do it. The point is that the mechanics as they stand encourage it, particularly at early levels. I think the biggest reason is that while the class hypothetically encourages versatility it rarely works out that way. The Ds's biggest liability is arguably its bad aptitudes. Trying to turn a fighter into a hybrid caster after he gets "Powered by Pain" is about as smooth as shifting gears without a clutch, so naturally if this happens below level 5 the player is going to be tempted to start scum until he gets what he wants. Raising aptitudes to human levels would partially ameliorate this, but at the cost of creating a fresh new balance nightmare to resolve. You could add more mutations to the point where scumming for builds becomes effectively impossible (aka double down on the problem). Alternatively you could just grey out non-hybrid classes so we won't think they're recommended. >_<