Vestibule Violator
Posts: 1508
Joined: Monday, 21st November 2011, 07:40
Implement event chance smoothing on EV and SH
EV and SH builds have a harder time with intuitive threat assessment than AC builds. You may be able to tab through 3 orc warriors while taking no damage, while the fourth high-rolls twice and nearly kills you. It's a natural feature of random events; you get runs of hits and misses far longer and more often than feels statistically likely. This leads to higher learning curve and burning consumables in not-very-threatening fights somewhat more often. Burning consumables is good, but it feels better when it's on opponents that are innately scary, and not due to just a sequence of bad rolls (and it's easier to balance the game when a large portion of combos don't have 10% fewer consumables due to more susceptibility to randomness).
The most straightforward solution to the remarkably long runs that random variables are prone to is an event-smoothing algorithm like MOBAs use for crits. Basically, instead of actually having a fixed chance to crit on every attack (which leads to multiple crits in a row and huge dry stretches more than feels right to people) they have a smaller-than-nominal chance to crit, which increases every time you don't crit (and resets when you do.) By selecting the initial event-chance and the non-event-increment appropriately, you can get the expected event rate to be the same as your uniform distribution. This sort of thing is also done for some loot crates (like Hearthstone card packs).
For the more visual taverners, here's the effect of the dota smoothing algorithm for a 25% event chance:
Obviously, this 'event state' would need to be reset for each monster that attacks you, to avoid stupid things like toting a pet kobold around with you to tank till you get a few consecutive misses before every fight.
I think this would probably improve the game feel if implemented for EV and SH, and I'd be willing to throw together a pull request if there was some interest.