Servers down; Lets talk build variety

I'm sure many of you are missing your NWN fix, so I thought I'd open up a thread to hear some community opinions. I'd like to add some more variety to the server by strengthening some of the under-used classes and feats to a more competitive level, and possibly and some new mechanics.

Generally, buffing something involves increasing a characters ability to damage targets and/or take less damage from enemies; I would prefer to do this in unique and interesting ways that would make sense in the DnD/NWN universe.



Here are some things I feel could be empowered somehow to add to the variety and fun of the server (I may go into more detail about my own ideas if there is enough interest)

Feats: Epic Reputation, Auto Quicken Spell, epic dragon knight/mummy, perfect health, planar turning, self conceal, superior initiative, blinding speed (currently gives a short speed boost).

Classes: I feel like most pvp encounters are dominated by barbarians, WMs, rangers, bards, clerics and mages. Some classes can do well in certain situations, like AA and paladin. Other classes, like high level rogue, SD, or CoT just seem very inefficient and weak. I would enjoy hearing what cool changes to the under-played classes the community can come up with, and I could share some of my own to add to the discussion later.



I also think that the server is lacking a summoning focused class (or classes). Certain strict requirements would have to be met and summoners would probably take heavy penalties to keep them balanced. Some classes I feel that could make good summoner candidates:

A high level RDD build could have strong dragon summons, possibly using the epic dragon knight spell. I would prefer to decrease the size of any summoned dragons though, as they tend to clutter up the screen.

Palemasters could make use of the epic mummy spell. The large ac increase in addition to the crit immunity would have to be looked into.

Shadow dancers could be interesting. Terrifying shadows doing your bidding, killing at your command.

Blackguards could summon foul demons, for a price.

Druids/Clerics could make for a good summoner, although they already have nice offensive and defensive spells at their disposal.

I really liked the way that things like gate on DeX were buffed. That epic balor summon was hella fun to use, as well as the mordekainen guard for mages. I think possibly opening up other options could be interesting as well, like buffing the various summon creature spells to make the 8th and 9th one's sort've on par with a buffed gate summon. Perhaps even spells like greater planar binding or w/e it is could have a use depending on your alignment, as a summon that is.

Not a fan of summons in pvp. Summons made more interesting/useful for levelling and pve would be nice. Summoning shrunk down fledgling dragons would be cool.

I like the idea of making unused feats and skills more interesting.

Summons should ideally be more of a distraction or some other isefulness then the actual killer, for instance I love what they did with the air elemental or bodak or wolf for example.

Summons in PvP are nasty overppwered for one thing alone lol. They will block your path over and over like a freaking troll(the internet kind).

Most summons are just meant to be mildly aggravating as they tend not to have good saves, especially fort, so you can just dev them or use a spell to quickly dispatch of them. That's just my take on it, summons on DeX were pretty much like that at least. It was a threat until you removed it and that was fairly easy to do.

Where you run into a problem is if you don't have things like dev crit. *Cough* Sinfar. And also they made the saves for certain things like dragon summon way too high.

I can't remember who had this idea.. but someone said that it'd be cool if Auto quicken spells made it so you couldn't be countered, I think that'd be an excellent way to put that feat to good use.

Besides the fact that if you somehow get slowed, you still have at least one tier of speed to rely on as a back peddle. Which is pretty much totally irrelevant but there it is anyways.

My idea for quicken was to make the spell uses regen faster, but the spell regen system is still pending full support. All the code is done amd ready, but hooking it into all the spells is so frealing tedious.

I think a summon based class really just needs to be able to summon many summons, instead of just one. I learned how to do this back on BadLands 60, nwn doesn't register the engine cap with multiple summons back to back(you could have loterally an army of 100+ summons there).

lolthatguy wrote:

I can't remember who had this idea.. but someone said that it'd be cool if Auto quicken spells made it so you couldn't be countered

Its an interesting idea, would have to require all three epic quicken spells due to the amount of power that would give a build.

Most likely I'll wait and see how the spell regen system from Highv turns out and go from there if needed.


Also I was thinking about the possibility of an influence system. Killing OR dying would give permanent influence to your character/account (less for dying, but I want to encourage sticking around in a fight rather than porting out at the slightest hint of defeat). It would basically be an achievement score, where if you reach certain thresholds, you can pick small rewards.

Could be a very interesting thing to have a 'monster hunter' character, who can go around capturing monsters to summon later. Pokey MON!

I can see a build like that being tons of fun to play pve, and who knows maybe some pvp usage. Summoning swarms of things heh.. that would be lots of fun as long as they were kept to small hp so could be cleared with great cleave or something lol

I think

Mage: Make a strong summon for leveling ONLY, once upon lvl 35+, make it back to basic, cause why not have a 65 ab/70 ac minion, than use spells to along with distractions for final levels?
-Also, get rid of this shit ass uber mords that strips a person naked with 2 mords.

AA: maybe +1 disc every 5 levels, IE 20 AA gets +4 disc., Nothing else, the AB madness is enough.

BG: +1 ab every 5 lvls using Bulls, along with +1d6 magic dmg every 12 levels. And 5 uses of bulls.


and no, all spells should be counterable. Period. An unstoppable mage isn't the fix Hex.

Only things I think of now. Maybe more ideas later.

[quote="Cory|01"]

lolthatguy wrote:

Also I was thinking about the possibility of an influence system. Killing OR dying would give permanent influence to your character/account (less for dying, but I want to encourage sticking around in a fight rather than porting out at the slightest hint of defeat). It would basically be an achievement score, where if you reach certain thresholds, you can pick small rewards.

No rewards for killing except winning. Don't turn this into BoW and DeX.

Uncounterable Caster =/= Unstoppable, it's also at the cost of three epic feats, one for 0-3 level spells, 2 for 4-6 level spells, and 3 for 7-9 level spells.

as if casters dont get a million bonus feats. I vote nonononono

lel, I pretty much said this a few weeks ago but it was with regards to you wanting a build that was utterly perfect, which is, Jesus Christ, just too ironic. Are you a real person Omni?

Omnifarious wrote:

i dont know what kind of build you're trying to make but it sound's like you just want some special shit so you can make a personalized build for yourself that's never gonna happen so just use what you're given and have fun

I have deciphered your text, Omnifarious (Please work on formatting!)

Paladin might be good in 1v1, but they are extremely vulnerable to dispel, making them a bit weaker in team pvp. I also had no plans on changing them myself outside of the holy sword buff highv has talked about.

Currently, 3 classes can get epic dodge, not 2.

Druid's summons are not good, they are just annoyances that take a round to kill. I'm not planning on adding summons that can kill in a round either, perhaps something more reliable than a wolf though. I just thought useful summons would be cool to use.



What I'm trying to do here is add new, balanced mechanics to the game to keep things somewhat fresh and interesting for the players. I didn't think anyone would be so opposed.

I don't think druids are weak myself, they get fairly good stats and have a lot of application in game as disablers even though their spell slots are pretty terrible, they get a nice buff to their ac as well as a buff to discipline from one with the land. Though I'm not against some buffs for summons, at all, I think it'd add a cool dynamic for casters as well as fighting the more summon oriented ones.

I wasn't planning on having much of anything done druids/cleric summons due to these classes innate power. Also, the summons thing was more an afterthought, not an "absolutely gonna happen" idea.

Cory|01 wrote:

What I'm trying to do here is add new, balanced mechanics to the game to keep things somewhat fresh and interesting for the players. I didn't think anyone would be so opposed.

Opposed isn't necessarily the reaction. The important thing to remember is that some players have had experiences similar to the ideas you come up with and those experiences were negative. Maybe they went to a server where Summon Creature I spawned a badger with 12 attacks per round and on hit death.

In other situations players simply have a negative connotation to the thing of which you are trying to improve. Some players simply don't like casters and to make casters stronger means to make the thing they hate even more common and even more likely to keep killing them.

In all forms of situations in which an assembled body of people exist within a community structure these factions are persistent all throughout. Some are the PRO-summons faction and others are the PRO-kd faction. The important thing to remember is to make certain that should your change affect the influence of any one particular faction, it should do so in a way that at least gradually introduces things on a level the opposing faction can come to terms with.

Of course as a dev you don't necessarily have to listen to the voices of those factions.... But that has it's own issues.