Dexterity - Make it do something

Delphinus

@Asmodron: Game balance is necessary to keep combat interesting and fun. Combatants want their hobby to be interesting and fun. When it's crap, people lose interest and there's less to do.

You're acting like a clown.

Sidonia

I am surprised people expect rational behaviour from Asmodron.

Isaiah

I know this is kind of cliche but I think dex should give a bonus to shooting accuracy and I quite liked the idea of bonus crit chance or even bonus crit damage.

Sena

The only suggestion I like so far is having dexterity influence criticals in some way. Having dexterity affect balance doesn't seem like a good idea, and having it affect both accuracy and dodging would be annoying. Dexterity affecting damage wouldn't be bad, but I can't think of anything it could apply to other than garrote (without some large changes and rebalancing).

Akia

Without a major redesign on how things work, especially for serpent, dex isn't as simple a fix as the narrow few things that have been posted so far(especially the dex reducing balance thing).  But, keep thinking up things, I'm sure even the Garden would enjoy looking at the ideas.  

Sena

Speaking of major redesigns, we could scrap accuracy/dodging entirely, and have dexterity influence damage like strength. Dexterity would replace strength (or maybe both would be used in some cases) for songblessed rapiers (or maybe all rapiers), daggers, dirks, thrown weapons, backstab, and blademaster attacks. Monks could have a stance or attacks that let you use dexterity instead of strength (or that could be a specialisation, if we get more intra-class diversity). Garrote and bow damage would also be influenced by dexterity. Bows would have reduced damage to make up for not missing (so serpents would do the most damage instead of being more accurate, artefact bows without subterfuge or chivalry would do much lower damage, etc.). Avoidance (and maybe all abilities that increase dodging) would give further physical damage reduction or some other bonus instead of dodging. This would also require a weaponry redesign, since to-hit is now meaningless.

I haven't thought this through very well.

Daklore

Dexterity. Don't need it.

It's always been one of those stats I ignore, since if you give it too much of an impact, the slightest change makes a huge difference, and if you give it very little, no one notices it. Only way to notice it, is to give it too much impact, or enough of an impact that we can math it in a short time frame.

Pass.

Akia

Sena said:

Speaking of major redesigns, we could scrap accuracy/dodging entirely, and have dexterity influence damage like strength. Dexterity would replace strength (or maybe both would be used in some cases) for songblessed rapiers (or maybe all rapiers), daggers, dirks, thrown weapons, backstab, and blademaster attacks. Monks could have a stance or attacks that let you use dexterity instead of strength (or that could be a specialisation, if we get more intra-class diversity). Garrote and bow damage would also be influenced by dexterity. Bows would have reduced damage to make up for not missing (so serpents would do the most damage instead of being more accurate, artefact bows without subterfuge or chivalry would do much lower damage, etc.). Avoidance (and maybe all abilities that increase dodging) would give further physical damage reduction or some other bonus instead of dodging. This would also require a weaponry redesign, since to-hit is now meaningless.

I haven't thought this through very well.

Yeah this is the kind of thing I'm talking about Sena, it's all a pretty major change but stuff like that would be really cool if we could get it balanced out.  So many aspects to be thought out, though.

Tagg

Dexterity/dodging is one of the most frustrating mechanics in the game. On one hand, it's necessary so that 90/120/240 rapiers aren't viable.

On the other hand, it's a completely unnecessary hindrance to offense that makes fighting certain combinations of classes/skills entirely pointless and/or incredibly boring for physical classes, especially as a monk.

Hopefully, the weapon re-work will handle the first problem, and then we can make dexterity interesting in ways Sena already gave examples for. Dodging be dumb.

Jacen

Really like those ideas, @ Sena. Expanding on the classes I'm most familiar with:

Monk:

  Damage reduction scales with DEX in Cat stance

Blademaster:

  Attack damage scales with DEX in Thyr stance.

Shaman/Runewarden:

  Effect of runes scales with DEX (Thurisaz, Hugalaz damage, increase healing effect of Uruz)

All gathering type abilities: 

  Increased chance to get more herbs/minerals/ingredients

Just a few ideas.

Nellaundra

Jacen said:

Blademaster:

  Attack damage scales with DEX in Thyr stance.

Mother of god, no.

Jacen

Nellaundra said:

Jacen said:

Blademaster:

  Attack damage scales with DEX in Thyr stance.

Mother of god, no.

Really? I thought it'd be cool. Would divide blademasters into two groups: High Dex Thyr (Low risk, medium return) High STR Arash (High risk, high return)

Eld

Jacen said:

Nellaundra said:

Jacen said:

Blademaster:

  Attack damage scales with DEX in Thyr stance.

Mother of god, no.

Really? I thought it'd be cool. Would divide blademasters into two groups: High Dex Thyr (Low risk, medium return) High STR Arash (High risk, high return)

If this was in conjuction with @Sena's ideas about removing accuracy/dodging, a major part of the current advantage of Thyr for combat would be gone, and increased damage from dex wouldn't do much to mitigate that since strength plays such a small role in blademaster combat. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it would need a more complete reworking, which would probably not be easily captured by the dex/str division.

Seldin

I do still like the idea of the dodging, even if I don't notice much. If anything, I'd like to just see something added to Dexterity to make it more viable to focus into.

Iocun

I've long been for removing dodging and all related mechanics (dex, to-hit, avoidance, abilities like drunkensailor/weaving/etc.) completely from the game. Yes, it would be a massive change that would raise many new questions (how to re-balance previously dodge-reliant classes, what to do about avoidance without just taking away the lessons people spent transing it, how to change forging and artie weapon stats), but it would by far be the cleanest solution. 

Just repurposing dex to give it a different advantage seems weird to me: why desperately seek a new mechanic for a stat just for the sake of keeping the stat name around? Making it replace strength for a few abilities doesn't really add anything beneficial. While we now have a few people who spec strength for damage, we'd then simply have people of one class spec strength for damage and people of another class spec dex for the same, but it would still be quite as one-dimensional a choice as today.

So in the end, it would be nothing but a flavour change. Flavour changes certainly have their place, don't take me wrong, but stats are no longer a good thing to base RP-relevant changes around. Racial specialisations had the whole point of reducing the connections between stats and RP, making stats today a largely invisible thing that only serves mechanical purposes.

Sena

While using dexterity for damage was mostly just the easiest way I could think of to keep it around (and I'd prefer some other use instead), it could be much more than a flavour change depending on how the related changes are balanced, mostly by having a class use both stats for different attacks and having to specialise in one or the other. Although that would also require a change to make high stats more meaningful for damage again, otherwise it usually won't make a big enough difference to matter.

For example, some weapons using dexterity and some using strength could have a pretty significant impact on knights (combined with a weaponry redesign), making it harder to simply switch from fast weapons to strong weapons because your stats are more suited to one or the other (or you go for a balance of the two so neither is as effective as they could be). It could make a big difference for sentinels as well, having to choose between higher dexterity for axe/spear or higher strength for maul and other metamorphosis attacks.

I'd rather keep dexterity in some form than delete it entirely, especially now that it's used for pickpocket (and presumably future theft abilities), which I think should have varying proficiency instead of everyone being equally skilled at it. Maybe it could have other non-combat effects, like influencing gathering as Jacen suggested, or balance recovery for tradeskills only (so high dexterity means faster forging for example, but not faster DSL), or balance recovery for movement abilities like evade, leap, fly, etc., or dodging could simply be replaced with damage reduction so dexterity reduces damage.

Iocun

I suppose it can be made to work like this. The issue I see with it influencing the damage of some attacks is just that in many cases, even if one class has attacks based on strength and others on dexterity, there will generally be one that is better than the other, if you want to go for max damage, so it doesn't really end up as a real choice between different options.

Yes, it would limit on-the-fly changing between different kinds of weapons, but the question is: do we want to limit that? In the end, it favours a combat style that consists more of doing one thing over and over, rather than using different abilities and weapons depending on the current combat situation, and I'm not sure we should move PvP more in the PvE direction, in that respect.

Sena

Iocun said:

Yes, it would limit on-the-fly changing between different kinds of weapons, but the question is: do we want to limit that?

Without any other changes, I'd say no (I would like more differentiation within classes, but something like "you can go with rapiers or battleaxes, not both" currently isn't a good way to do it). It was just an example of where dexterity for damage could be more than just flavour.

Jacen

In response to @Iocun's first post after mine, my intention, which I don't usually convey very well on forums, was to get away from one dimensionalizing classes. Take Serpent, for example. Going into a fight with a Serpent, what do you expect? Either the serpent is going to be very dodgy (high PvP impact) or have a lot of health (little PvP impact). I thought that we could use DEX to give more variety to classes. Instead of only meeting two kinds of serpents, a third option is there: Maybe high Dex serpents can do more damage with bows and garrote, so maybe you'd see a softlock/garrote or meteor/garrote or something. (Not in ACC, don't -plaugh- at my musings)

I think Achaea's 1v1 combat scene would improve if classes didn't have "Oh Blademaster's always kill like this, so that's what X is gonna do to me" strategies. Add variety so that you really have to watch your opponent's setup to figure out what he's setting you up for.

Iocun

But in order to get such variety to make a garrote-damage serpent viable, there's no need to attach this to dex. You might just as well make garrote damage strength-based.

Aerek

I think the idea of STR vs DEX builds runs something like the old "damage knight" vs "speed knight" incarnations of the knight classes. Back before the diminishing returns on strength and when writhing off a blade took much longer than it does now, you actually did have two different choices as a Knight. You could either spec STR with ridiculous axes in hopes of three-shotting your opponent with 2000 damage DSLs, or you could spec speed as Raja with ridiculous rapiers and delph/delph, impale, disembowel after your opponent attacks. (Like Blademasters do now!)

Let me be clear:  both of these builds were overpowered and horrendously dull to fight against when they existed, and I in no way want to see them return, but the variety within a single class was interesting. There were two different ways you could build yourself, with two very different strategies for each build, and both of them had pros, cons, and situations where they were more effective than the other. I think that's much more interesting than "I'm an X, this is the best way to be an X". Much harder to balance, yes, but a valid goal nonetheless.

Jacen

Right, that's what I was trying to get at. Making a stat matter to a class will encourage variety.Like pre traits, there were three monks: Fast, hard hitting, and telepathy. Now, there are only two: Fast and hard hitting, or telepathy. With the traits system, we gained RP variety but lost PvP variety. Dex could be reworked to bring it back.

Aliath

Well wouldn't diminished returns effect Dex as well?

Sena

Aliath said:

Well wouldn't diminished returns effect Dex as well?

If it affected damage, I imagine it would likely be identical to strength.

Aepas

I think removing dex dodge would be pretty good, as it doesn't do too much by itself and is not really noticed too much, except maybe unartied monks.

I think we could keep weaving/drunkensailor/whatever, but make it more of a % chance to dodge. I think that would put it more on par and balance the difference between low tier players and artied beasts.
I.E. saw a serpent with weaving get hit 50/50 times by soulpiercers, then maybe 20/50 times to a younger guy.

creating a more stable to hit, while still allowing certain classes to dodge would be fine in my opinion.

All for having dex mildly affect crit chances.

Also, why are dex items the most expensive as artefacts

Avto

If you take away the only upside of a soulpiercer - to-hit - then you would have to reimburse them with either damage or speed, that would lead to even more ridiculous gap between artied and unartied.

Hit and dodge can't be adressed unless weaponry and weapon stats are fixed. Until we see what they have in works we can't really make any suggestions.

Also making huge changes based on making one stat meaningful is wrong.

Sena

Avto said:
Hit and dodge can't be adressed unless weaponry and weapon stats are fixed. Until we see what they have in works we can't really make any suggestions.

This is somewhat backwards. Obviously making to-hit meaningless requires a huge overhaul to weaponry. But the weaponry changes have to be made with that in mind, so the decision of whether or not to remove dodging necessarily has to come before the decision of how to change weaponry.

Avto said:
Also making huge changes based on making one stat meaningful is wrong.

Removing dodging makes dexterity less meaningful, requiring further benefits to be added to dexterity just to keep the stat at all, so obviously "making one stat meaningful" isn't a reason for removing dodging. The main reason is that it's an annoying, frustrating mechanic that doesn't really add much to the game and makes balancing more difficult.

Tvistor

I am probably a class-traitor for saying it, but serpent damage with a L3 bow is already too high IMO. There's very little incentive for them to even bother with sparring. If dexterity was altered to affect serpent snipe, I'm hoping that the damage sees a fairly significant decrease.

The downside is, of course, serpents would lose some raid utility, particularly for those people who have no idea what to do in a melee.

Iocun

L3 bow damage is high, but not more so for serpents than for knights, plus other classes have very powerful range as well when artied (ranging from artied kai chokes over soulspears to artied star+doppie warp). I'd still be happy with slight nerfs to bow damage if serpents got other forms of group utility in return (mostly in melee). Problem with serpents in group combat is that they're excellent at one thing (line of sight), but have less than other classes in the other group combat aspects (be that melee, area control, general hindering, etc.). I'd still much rather be, say, a knight than a serpent in group combat. You get archery that's almost as good as a serpent's with artefact bows, plus very group-effective melee (dsl dealing both afflictions and damage, impale, engage, lunge, arc, razeslash), ranged utility with falcons, and further knight-subclass specific things ranging from thurisaz and runeblades over rites and hands to gravehands/soulspear/blackwind/etc.

Serpents are awesome in 1v1, but aren't as versatile in group fights as quite a few others, so I don't see an issue with archery being powerful to compensate for that.

Tvistor

Over half the serpents I've met have totally eschewed learning anything related to doublestab/bite in favor of just using L3 snipes. A ridiculous amount of people die to it as well.

I'd just prefer it if you couldn't just whip out a bow and score a ton of kills without knowing the first thing about combat. (that goes for any class, really)