Beta Blog on IGN about # of heroes and skills

IGN has blogs?? whatever woot more skills i thought it would just be this

I wonder how many dramatically is.

I just think we need a few more, but a lot of them getting major changes to them, and some getting major or complete redesigns.

Another 10 or 20 skills is something a lot of people have asked for though.  So i'm glad they're listening to the feedback!

   Reading through it..
   "As we went through each Demigod, we came up with ideas that would make that Demigod play more uniquely. Examples included (depending on the Demigod in question), sacrificing speed for toughness, increasing money received from mines, decreasing cool down times on spells, increasing XP gained from killing creeps, increasing damage done to structures, increases toughness of nearby minions, and so on.

    When we put together our first list, we quickly realized that just from the skills, you could make one Rook play quite differently from another rook and that was before we even started messing with items and equipment."

   This sounds okay, on paper.  But in practice, it'll be the term i've liked to use a lot that the balance will be "cracked".

   With skills so simple, anyone who knows how to type numbers, *'s, +'s, /'s, and ()'s into google and copy the numbers into a .txt file can pretty easily calculate what skills are the best.

   It's like in Diablo2. The skills have neat effects and function and all (I loveeee frozen orb! Going out. spinning around shooting out ice circles in a circle around it!) but.. everyone knows what the best combinations of skills and equip in that game is.  It's very simple math.
In DotA theres a certain skill you get first, item you get first, and recipe you get first for each character.

   You look at Guild Wars though, and a group of people can have completely different opinions on whether a skill is good or not, whether a build is good or not, whether a combination of builds together is good or not, and they can argue with each other about it endlessly and never agree.  The skills have so much depth, there are so many factors that change how they perform, they are different in some situations instead of others, and what your allies  are using makes a huge difference on whether your build is good or not.
   GW has like 900 skills, but you can only use 8 of them, so it's not like it has all this deep balancing justbecause of the high level of skills.  It's because the skills work more like the abilities in a card game like Magic:The Gathering more than they work like in a traditional RPG.

   Just because you ALLOW people to play differently, and give them different options, doesn't mean they WILL.
   I think asking the question "What sort of skills can we put on this Demigod" isn't as important as the question of how to get people to actually use the different variaty of skills and not all use the same ones.

innociv:

I totally agree.  I think that we need to work hard as beta testers make sure stardock and gpg make skills that are useful and we can debate which is better and never really agree.  Of course for one play style or another, one skill will beat the other, but it would be nice to have it so that no skill is truly better than another, just different.  Please help me with that idea, as that is very important to me.

Also, on a related not regulus mines suck!!! Don't mean to be rude, but I have yet to find them even mildly useful.  If the balance is right, rather than toss these they can improve the concept by making the mines more powerful or what not.  The point as innociv points out is to make skills useful and make people want to use them.  I know a rpg did this when I agonize over what to choose, because I like both chooses so much that I can't imagine being with out either.

Stun mines are actually nice.

But i wish they held someone in place, but they could still attack and cast spells(except for teleports) for 7 or 8 seconds rather than stun.
Or maybe less duration but you leach health from them when they are rooted, or they take more damage.  Then root+snipe and you gain a lot of health if it's leach, or a lot more damage if it makes them take more damage.

And if snipe wasn't homing it would be a lot more useful to keep someone still.

Skills need to work together.. both for the Demigods own, and allys skills cross-working-together.  The only cross-working-together that exsists now is stunning. :/  Only Demigod with synergies is the Rook.

GW has over 1.4k skills i counted

GW?

if you had read the post you replied to you would know

With the skills we have now the game extermly fun i can only wait and see how great this game will become.

I hope we have 1000's of player online all the time this is going to be so cool.

@Innociv's "Diablo 2" style skills:

I can't really agree with this.  If it's such simple math, then it's just a matter of the devs crunching numbers to make sure all skills balance out.  You may lack synergy, but that doesn't make it cracked.  Getting people to use certain skills is simply a matter of making sure the skills stay within a particular play style. 

For instance, if someone's playing as the rook, they're probably not in it for the speed upgrades, they're there to wade into battle and deal out damage, so a passive that sacrifices speed for damage makes sense, but you wouldn't have a passive that goes the other way.

Also, consider that GW has a buttload of status effects, which lend a lot to the skill variances.

Everything is balanceable if the designers spend enough time at it. Obviously the more skills they have the more change they will mess a few of them up but there is no law saying it is unbalanceable just because there is x amount of skills. They just have to make sure that they add meaningful skills. As someone said a +damage -speed on the rook would be popular but a +speed -damage would be less useful to most people. Some demigods would be more or less suited to certain playstyles than others and if they can recognise this then it should be easy enough to balance.

Isanetitan, there are a number of D2 builds per character, but not as many as there could be given the number of skills.

The thing is, say you havea +build damage skill for Rook like mentioned in the article.  That sounds fine, but why would I pick it over +damage to players?  If they're all dead, i don't need to worry about buildings resisting my hammer.
So how do you get people to use it?  Just add MORE +building damage?  The thing is, it's such a situational sort of skill.  If you balance situational skills by making them very overpowered in that one situation, then it annoys people on the receiving end of that situation.  Really the skill would be balanced at the lower +building damage level, but it wouldn't be attractive to put points into.

innociv,

I have to partially disagree with your last comment:

+build damage skill for Rook like mentioned in the article.  That sounds fine, but why would I pick it over +damage to players?

That is where the difference and uniqueness happens.  What if I want to be a building smashing fiend and don't really need to worry about the lesser things.  I have allies attacking the creeps while I go for what really matters in the games; portals, flags, and the stronghold.

Some people will want a creep/hero oriented hero others will take a building oriented approach while others go for health and others an all around balance of power and abilitly.

It is just like in Sins.  SOme people spam LRM's while other's build their eco and other's play a more balanced strategy. 

There will be as many builds per character as there are skills.  The only difference is whether or not people will use them.  I don't disagree that a lot of people will go for a "uber awesome" or publicly hyped combonation of skills.  What will matter most in the end though is how you interact with your fellow teamates and create a synergy between the heros and not just a bunch of single glory hogs that get mowed down by a coordinated attack.  Becuase if I know that some noob is going to take a certain path because its "over powered" I know there is a way to counter it and I will and I will win. 

You know that all too well in beating many people in Sin's who liked the LRM spam move.

Innociv, Diablo is a PvE game and vs Monsters its alot easier to have a "perfect" build then vs players as players unlike monsters adapt; I mean in the end RTS like Starcraft of Supcom also have just a few numbers (a bit more fore supcom^^) and still I doubt there is a mathematical way to have a perfect strategy, Demigod might have only 5 Demigods in a 5vs5 but I guess the amount of possible variations of  decisions will still be higher than 10^12 and then there is still the execution of it.

Exactly, if you are just going to be playing by yourself then you can have your ultimate build, but in teams a lot of the skills will shine, a couple torchbearers can stun/fireball/aoe the players/creeps to oblivion while you destroy the buildings. An entire team all with the ultimate 'solo' builds will probably kick ass 1v1 but once you get some 3v3 or above battles the other team will probably be better able to support each other.

Well that's exactly what i've been saying, Subjagator, that which build you use should depend more on what Demigod your allies are using, and what Demigod your enemies are using, not which Demigod YOU are using.

And I still agree with what I said about more building damaging.  The threat is enemies, not buildings.  You want to kill the people trying to stop you from killing the buildings, so you can then kill the buildings at your leisure. 
  It'd have to be a massive damage bonus so you could destroy buildings so quickly that the enemy couldn't stop you(which means, and tele back to base.  But then.. I'll quote what I posted earlier! "So how do you get people to use it?  Just add MORE +building damage?  The thing is, it's such a situational sort of skill.  If you balance situational skills by making them very overpowered in that one situation, then it annoys people on the receiving end of that situation."

In order to make it useful the rook would have to destroy the building in about 3 seconds.
Why?  The people who you are attacking have scrolls to teleport to a friendly building, where they can then stun you.
This means so much damage that the Rook would REALLY piss off the enemy.  It's the case I said where in order to make someone use a situational skill, you make it so overpowered.  So people DO use it, but it annoys people on the receiving end.
If it just did a little bit of damage, then it's taking too long, and you're sacrificing too much killing power.  You'd want to kill the enemy so they have to respawn, and destroy buildings while they are respawning at a more leisurely pace.

Imagine a skill that said "Instantly kill an enemy if they are standing between 10 and 11 meters east or west of a tower and facing directly, within 5 degrees, north or south."  Well, that's a mighty rare occurance for that to happen.  So it's balanced.. right?  Well it won't seem very balanced when it instantly kills you.