Mines Malingerer
Posts: 38
Joined: Tuesday, 28th February 2012, 00:57
Draining: a sensible solution
Correct me if I'm wrong but I read the mechanic for draining does +50% damage on proc correct? Or is it 1d50% damage? I've heard average is 25 so I'm going to assume this is correct for the purpose of this suggestion.
First, make HD reduction slightly more useful
Make HD reduction short lived, regaining 1 HD about twice as fast HP at most. But make the HD reduction 1d2 HD instead of just 1.
This gives to different advantages:
-the damage multiplier advantage to high damage slow weapons while also lightening up the HD of monsters slightly
and
-the HD monster weakening more effective on low damage fast weapons without it being totally pointless to reduce HD. If this is too much, keep current HD reduction and simply scale the next proposal to balance.
Second: XP as a consistency issue, where to make up for that +5% average damage over just 66% of the time
The ability to kill outright a monster with 0 HD is powerful, but the XP loss makes it impractical and a painful sacrifice most players, especially for those without spoilers that notice the XP loss in the description. And considering your XP goes down whether draining is used ON the player or BY the player, that lost XP seems to being disappearing from the world, why not instead give this temporary XP and HD drains to the monster or player in the form of:
-MP as a function of 1d((damage dealt)/3)(1+HD drained/4), perhaps capped at 5, a 10 damage weapon could do at max 5 mp recovery, on average about 2 mp, this being every drain success, this would be the counterpart of vampiric brand, it heals less in MP since MP is lower than HP in most cases, and it would be a better fit for evil magic players fitting with it's theme as an evil ego sapping energy from those it strikes.
The mp cap of 5, and the fact it drains only 2/3 of the time, which could change for balance, and the drain of XP without the issue of dancing if rot is removed, or just dancing for HD death, become non-issues.
This means the temporary HD reduction could affect XP the same way, but I think the fact that it takes time for the monster HD to return, but less time than it takes for monsters to heal (as more time would essentially work like now so it isn't fixing anything), it gets rid of dance draining and it:
-gives squishy characters a reason to take the XP hit on powerful monsters, Because the HD reduction is actually effective to combat and to convert drained HD to mana!
Vampiric brand is STILL better in terms of hp conversion WITHOUT XP loss, albeit no damage perk but still a huge food cost, putting them at far more equal footing in my opinion. This can work with or without hp rot but without it discourages dancing and in my opinion doesn't fit with the theme of draining life per se.
Is there any other suggestions for a change to draining? Should it be kept as is? What could change about my proposal to make it better? Thanks.