Balancing

Blystos Re · Post by **Blystos Re** » Fri May 11, 2007 11:29 am

Amoenotep wrote:i agree..you need to stop going outside and play neversummer more.....NOW GET TO IT!!!!!!!

The Jungle I call my yard would have to disagree.

Wolfarus · Post by **Wolfarus** » Fri May 11, 2007 11:31 am

Assuming you have a shifter, you are THE best counter to any build that any faction can produce. How is this so, you may ask? simple..

Threaten that you will LET them kill you while shifted. you die, server crashes.

That should be more then enough to let you get your way while doing anything in-game

mgrjebbo · Post by **mgrjebbo** » Fri May 11, 2007 1:07 pm

not funny..... i find playing a shifter almost unbearable. you cant even tell what your stats, ab,ac ect are... ontop of that anytime you pickup something shifted it resets your stats to something different than they should be.

is there a reason that the server removes and re-equips all gear every transition. while shifted that lowers your abilities, makes gear not stack right and otherwise screws everything up.

coming from someone who plays one and is based out of TC, shifters should be removed from the server until the dm's and devs can figure out how to make them not buggie.

if they cant ever figure it out then well we live with out them. oh and pm's should be nerfed!

Post by **Mr. O'Dearly** » Fri May 11, 2007 2:58 pm

Shifters aren't that complicated.
Not all of the mechanics are obvious but they are consistent and the gear does work correctly.
Take some time to work out what happens when.
Other than the reshifting on transition and item pickup, it all comes out making sense.

I have 2 lvl 30+ shifters. I have crashed the server 3 times.

Findor · Post by **Findor** » Fri May 11, 2007 5:17 pm

This is not about the search for the holy grail or anything else, so plz do not go into lengths about feats, PRC, or anything else off topic.

I don't see how I was going off-topic. You want Timestop. I want Monk Speed or Uncanny Dodge in a fighter class. Peter Player wants this or that. We don't have it because the NS4 developers have tried to create an interesting but different environment having some measure of balance. I personally don't like the fact that Monks can almost single-handedly steal a relic while a half dozen or more MA toons are standing around swinging at air. I might think that is "unbalanced," but again there is no such thing as balance in NWN. The NS4 developers have done the best they could by their lights. On any decent NWN server, you have to figure out what works best. I would NEVER build a L30 Bard toon anywhere else, but they sure are effective here.

I feel your pain, though. It's hard investing a lot of time in building a L40 toon only to find out that you overlooked a peculiarity of the server. That's why I recommended a long time ago that a way be implemented to "trade in" XPs from one (unsatisfactory) toon to apply to another - even if it was at a low exchange rate (say 25%). I have seen this done on one other server where it took longer to level toons than here. And the developers did it because they realized that hardly anyone "gets it right" the first (or even third) time, and they wanted to ease the pain. The upside of this would be better overall builds, leading to better PvP play.

P. Fricebottle · Post by **P. Fricebottle** » Fri May 11, 2007 5:46 pm

AllAmerican wrote:Build to defeat a TS spammer or dont, it is totally up to you.

You talk about it as if it is an easy task...

Post by **AllAmerican** » Fri May 11, 2007 6:22 pm

Problem with the Trade in system is that you can build a exp getter ECL 0 human, that is in its favored class, and use it to get exp for your ECL 3 non favored class toons. I doubt you ever see this here in NS4.

Building to "counter" the time stop spell is easy, you just have to do some home work. I have noticed a great way to get around TS is a high hide/ms dancer. Dosent work every time, but it does work well, when dancing and time stop is cast, they still cant see you. You just have to anticipate when they are going to cast TS. Also there are spells that counterspell TimeStop, they work as well. You may have to get more then one player to destroy a timestopper, but it can be done. Like said earlier, it is not an "I win button"

Lorkar1 · Post by **Lorkar1** » Sun May 13, 2007 7:41 am

AllAmerican wrote:Problem with the Trade in system is that you can build a exp getter ECL 0 human, that is in its favored class, and use it to get exp for your ECL 3 non favored class toons. I doubt you ever see this here in NS4.

Make it a 10% trade-in usable only after 30th level, that way even if someone does what you are saying it wont really be a big deal. Personally I would love a way to get through the 31-32nd level doldrums. For whatever reason those always seem to be the longest lasting levels for me.

Findor · Post by **Findor** » Sun May 13, 2007 10:09 am

Problem with the Trade in system is that you can build a exp getter ECL 0 human, that is in its favored class, and use it to get exp for your ECL 3 non favored class toons. I doubt you ever see this here in NS4.

That could be handled programmatically: you can only use traded-in XPs towards toons of the same ECL or lower. A toon's ECL is, after all, only a value which could be used in a conditional scripting statement.

disastro · Post by **disastro** » Sun May 13, 2007 8:38 pm

plus you could easily make the exchange rate such that it would be faster to level up an ecl 3 toon to that point than it would to make an ecl 0 and then trade it in.

i'd love a trade in system for some of my busted toons, but thats a time/code consuming thing thats probably best handled as a reward for a major DM run event. then they could just delete you and level the new toon to whatever manually.

a great idea for an event would be for the final top contestants to get thrown into the Thunderdome, winner gets killed and deleted as well but gets a new toon levelled up to whatever.

but that's WAY off topic lol