Wasteland Attribute/Skill/Feat ReBalancing Ideas

[Immortal]

So I saw a great conversation going on in the shoutbox (I don't have access to it because of newfag status)

About people talking about feats and attribute re-balancing.. Making a patch to have these things changed would not be difficult but making them balanced and feel good would be much harder

I think a general consensus that everyone has right now is this..

• Laser weapons go from extremely shitty to extremely over powered very quickly because of their multiplicative effect on armored foes. (They don't just overcome your armor threshold.. they literally do more damage if you wear armor.. It would have been nice to have armor types factored into this.. not sure how a bullet proof vest means I take MORE damage from a laser weapon)
• Intelligence is too meta gamey as a stat because of the threshold spots
• Luck is a dump stat because it doesn't effect enough things
• Traits are in the game but basically unused / unimplemented. You can make use of them through cheating but.. if they were to be implemented as a mod or patch what would they look like?
• Demolitions should effect your rank with explosives.. (Currently explosives are just OP as fuck with no % to jam or miss and demolitions feel lackluster as a trap opener)
• Alarm disabling also feels a little lackluster..
• Make mellee enemies unable to run across the world in a single turn
• Make enemies more intelligent and punishing to players

Thoughts? Disagreements? Other skills or Thoughts? Try to avoid plot spoilers and just concentrate on game pacing.. We all know the game has 2 acts..

EDIT
I am currently playing the game with only 4 rangers on hard.. and although I do reload occasionally.. I generally feel the game is not punishing enough and kind of easy.. So I would lean more towards rebalancing things so that they make sense.. but also making the game harder..

 

[Volourn]

Overall, good ideas though most of them have already been brought up.

One idea is 'cross skill bonuses' for similar skills. ie. if you are both a doctor and a medic you should get a bonus to the other. ie. A doctor would increase the health you heal and a medic would incrase the health % you get back.

As for enemies, they should be a llowed to use med paks and the like too.

Luck can be improved. It cna be sueful. Getting the bonus ap/or 'lucky dodge'/'lucky hit' can aid in combat. Eenemies should get benefit from it. Luck should help with lots of stuff.

Traits can definitely be used to round out characters.

The stats should boost certain skills too and certain skills should have 'stat thresholds'. A 1 INT characters should not be a master at computers.

Lots of other stuff.

 

[Tigranes]

Re. laser - reworking by armour type can be iffy because I can hardly tell what kind of armour some enemies have, let alone non-human ones. Maybe it should go by whether you have any kind of metal on you? Or just change from a multiplier to a linear scale?

All the attributes are basically threshold based (including the crazy speed + int + strength in multiples of 4 rule) and if they're going to be fixed I expect rejigging would need to happen across the board. Maybe make CI tied primarily to awareness and combat speed/AP tied to speed, but to compensate have them confer very few bonuses otherwise? I don't know, there's a lot of knock on effects here.

Explosives should have % to throw wrongly yes, but if that is implemented rigorously with low explosive characters missing all the time (like Fallout) you'd need to make them slightly cheaper/stronger to balance it out.

Volo's point on cross-skill synergy is a good one, e.g. Repair & ComSci, Medic & Surgeon, Brawl & Blade (which helps melee characters), etc.

Any and every mod should integrate faster skill use times.

 

[Volourn]

EXplosives are already extremely useful. They took what seemed 'impossible' or 'really hard' fights and made them 'doable' or even 'easy'. But, yeah, they should be more tied to a skill. Can even add a literal (mini) rocket launcher. <>

 

[Cyberarmy]

Armor is pretty useless, especially powerful ones. They need STR to use, weighs a lot and make you a very easy target for energy weapons. Also most weapons have good AP values and make some armor pointless as soon as you get them. Earlier 1-4 armors become completely useless when we reach Titan Canyon. Some end battles become a joke as soon as you strip your armor...

Energy weapons need to change, either give them all 10 AP and some stun chance (more effective if enemies armor is high) or raise damage by a percentage for each point difference.

Explosives should have much smaller range, AoE and 0 AP if your thrower have zero skill invested in esxplosives skill. Their AoE and AP values should rise with skill level.

 

[Volourn]

I'd have energy weapons just ignore armour but not do 'extra damage' to show that they are powerful and lazery enough to simply go through armour like butter even though it probably isn't 'super realistic' espicially since the game doesn't have degrading equipment. This would mean energy weapons would be highly valuable no matter the armour of the enemy giving them a legit advantage over other weapons without it being smarter to be naked. But, they should have slightly less pure damage comapred to equivlant weapons/cost more zp/or whatever to balance things more.

 

[Norfleet]

Explosives should have % to throw wrongly yes, but if that is implemented rigorously with low explosive characters missing all the time (like Fallout) you'd need to make them slightly cheaper/stronger to balance it out.

Realistically, I would say that the difficulty of explosives is not that they would be "thrown wrongly", but that they would EXPLODE wrongly, which is far worse! You don't need to know anything about explosives to throw a grenade. You just need to be able to throw things. Doing it wrong isn't in the throwing, it's in the parts before and after the throwing. Maybe the character throws the grenade, and it lands too early, and the enemy kicks it away or even back. Maybe he throws too late, and the grenade explodes too early, showering the party in shrapnel. Or maybe he BREAKS it attempting to pull the pin. These are old grenades. Have you ever seen what happens when a grenade goes horribly wrong? It ain't in the throwing. It's when it falls apart as you pull the pin and you're left wondering which part is about to explode when you don't know anything about grenades. If your character has no Explosives, he knows nothing about the anatomy of a grenade. When you pull the pin, and instead of behaving as expected, the HEAD COMES OFF, what do you do now?

Obviously, grenades are the easiest thing: They're meant to be used by people who don't otherwise have training as demolitionists. Some of the other throwables are a lot more complicated. Maybe if there were more exploding things that you could use. Right now, all you can do is disarm things. You can't actually USE them.

 

[Immortal]

Overall, good ideas though most of them have already been brought up.

Yea that's the point.. I am trying to get all suggestions and ideas in one place.. I also want any ideas that maybe sounded good at first but weren't to be called out as well. Thanks for your feedback.

Explosives:
What about adding a higher Jam% that decreases with the demolitions skill across the board and then adding demolition requirements for more of the advanced stuff.. Like Rockets would require 4 or 5 in demolitions. Makes the skill more niche and valuable without making it mandatory to lob grenades..

Lasers:
Let them burn through armor threshold with lower pure damage as Volly said... so that they work well against heavy armor and robotic creatures as opposed to more conventional weapons.. but again.. don't let them just completely decimate armored foes to the point where you should roll naked characters in the second half of the game..

Additional Feedback welcomed.. Please keep this going anyone who has an interest in a balance mod for WL2..

 

[Norfleet]

What about adding a higher Jam% that decreases with the demolitions skill across the board and then adding demolition requirements for more of the advanced stuff.. Like Rockets would require 4 or 5 in demolitions. Makes the skill more niche and valuable without making it mandatory to lob grenades.

Honestly, I don't think that makes all that much sense. You don't need to be a demolitionist to fire a rocket launcher. In fact, there's pretty much no overlap in the skillsets other than that both involve things which explode. The truth is, explosions are simple and effective, and this is why poorly trained terrorists love them. When they've already been made into premade packages for you in the form of grenades and rocket launchers, it gets even easier! Demolitions is about making small explosions destroy big things, making explosive devices do things they aren't designed to do, and making things that are going to explode not explode, or at least not destroy whatever they were going to destroy. Very little of this has any direct application to the use of exploding things against man-sized targets. If you want to destroy a building using this crate of hand grenades, which should, by naive reckoning, be inadequate for the task, you ask your demoman. If you want to turn it into a landmine, you ask your demoman. If you want to blow up an enemy, you pull the pin and lob it. Using a device for its intended purpose is simple, that's why they're made to be that way. The demolition skill should have let you deploy your own IEDs into the battlefield...but it's not that kind of game.

Let them burn through armor threshold with lower pure damage as Volly said... so that they work well against heavy armor and robotic creatures as opposed to more conventional weapons...

Yeah, but giving them simply high AP values is sort of meaningless: Armor simply isn't a real factor for any weapon class except maybe SMGs: Even high-end pistols have decent AP ratings. The energy weapon mechanic makes it distinctive. Silly and not particularly realistic, but distinctive. As an RPG rather than a realistic tactical simulation, this sort of distinction is required. Realistically, a functioning energy weapon would function exactly like a regular weapon. If you have to completely retrain your army to make use of your fancy new-issue lazor rifles (why are they called rifles, anyway? They aren't rifled...), reducing your entire army to the skill level of raw recruits, you are going to invest your money in some weapon that your guys can actually use. So realistically, should a lazor gun actually come to exist and be practical as a weapon, it will work essentially indistinguishably from your current rifle. You will pick it up, point it at the enemy, and pull the trigger. It will be generally more accurate and probably at least as deadly. Your troops will hate it because it breaks when it is dropped, slammed, or falls in the mud. It will be immensely vexing to them that they cannot use it as a hammer or a melee weapon.

Your army will lose to a bunch of towelheads with AKs. Because they don't have any armor, so your weapons cannot hurt them.

 

[Morkar Left]

Will make a couple of other suggestions (maybe suckgestions...) later, but regarding Demolitions; how about 1. scavenge mines and 2. let's use them yourself and 3. let you craft explosives, grenades etc. out of them?

 

[Immortal]

Will make a couple of other suggestions (maybe suckgestions...) later, but regarding Demolitions; how about 1. scavenge mines and 2. let's use them yourself and 3. let you craft explosives, grenades etc. out of them?

I still think explosives as a weapon are OP with almost no disadvantage to using them.. Any ideas?

danke sehr.

 

[Morkar Left]

Throwing precision should be dependent on the demolition skill with %-chances not hitting the exact spot you want.

 

[jagged-jimmy]

Add more carry weight per STR point. I'm dumping stuff all the time and still have overloading troubles - with average STR team and 2 high-STR specialists.

I would also make stats more useful, by adding stat requirements/bonuses to skills (high str for brute force for ex.). But it is too late now and won't work for all skills.

 

[Higher Animal]

Luck - Luck should not only increase crit chance but decrease opponent crit chance. Luck should also decrease critical failure on using non-combat skills.

Coordination - Useless fucking skill for the most part. How is it that in the description of Coord it is said to be useful for lock picking/alarms and it really isn't? The least Inxile could do is update the description in the character creation screen.

Int - OP. Part of the problem is that skill enhancing books don't require skill checks from what I've seen in addition to being scarce. Either way Int needs to be rebalanced. My suggestion is to eliminate Action point bonuses and increase the point threshold for increased skill point gain. Int 5 and Int 9, and 10.

Speed - Minus the AI run distance bug this is probably the most balanced stat in the game.


The other stats are off and need to mesh with abilities but for the most part I don't really have problems with the others.

On stealth/Alarm/traps/perception/mines. Oh boy, where do we begin. I feel like there this is an underdeveloped, unbalanced portion of WL2 that would make it substantially better. It's not that stealthy, crafty gameplay is nowhere to be found. It's just rare.

I'll update this post with some more thoughts about the badly implemented non-combat portions of the game.

To be fair to this game, however, it is a 7/10 effort and a series with a lot of potential. If they make a sequel addressing the myriad problems built into it and spend a little bit more time polishing everything the next game could be good.

 

[Rhalle]

Dumping stats should be more punishing. There needs to be heavy downsides to going 1 with any stat.

 

[Black]

Luck already increases chance of using skills.

 

[jagged-jimmy]

Dumping stats should be more punishing. There needs to be heavy downsides to going 1 with any stat.

Coordination: Make average stat + max skill give total to hit. So headshots at 100% will only be possible with above average coordination, maxed out weapon skill and weapon mods.

Strength: Add a threshold as on energy weapons. Each melee weapon with min stat requirement and then a threshold: with Str above *X dmg, under *0.X. So your melee fighter with 2 Str will suck balls.

Luck: add more jam chance and negative Crit Hits (-20%, -15%, 0%, +5% etc.) at low stat value. Maybe add a chance of critical failure while doing anything. Like shooting your own foot or party more frequently. Breaking arms while swinging a swort, etc. Skiping turns.

Constitution: make injuries/deseases/debuffs more negative and add resistance based on Con. Remove timer on negative effects. Remove with medic/surgeon only.

Int / Cha: can be tied to speech skills. Give subsantial bonuses on barter, computers.

Awareness: not sure, maybe add AoO (Ambush or not) with high awareness.

-> i.e. any influence on game mechanics by stats is pretty welcome.

 

[Morkar Left]

Relate skills to attributes and let the skills only go as high as the attribute score (Int 8, Computer Science max of 8).

Attributes should give a %-bonus to the related skill(s) checks; average gives none, above average (6+) gives 2% bonus per point, max 10 % at attribute score of 10. Worse than average scores should give penalties on attribute scores similar to the boni. Luck should reduce the chance for critical failures instead of giving attribute boni in this system.

Injuries and the like should stay in effect and only get cured by surgeon or doctors. Currently it never effects anything in my game. Maybe let it be like it is for easy difficulty.

Crouching should give a penalty when you're in melee similar to giving a bonus for shooting.

Increase the overall max range of weapons, at least for handweapons.

Heavy guns should have its own weapon modifications or they should be a bit more powerful.

Energy weapons could be changed, but I'm not sure in this regard.

 

[Volourn]

"njuries and the like should stay in effect and only get cured by surgeon or doctors. "

Why? Concussions, in real life, don't usually get 'cured' by doctors. It just requires rest/time depending how serious of a conciussions.

"Currently it never effects anything in my game."

I believe you are understating it. While injuries aren't 'game breakers' but losing stats like -3speed/str can make a difference or losing 3 ap or getting minues to different skills like when you try to basha door and break your hand, your character is now useless in bashing more doors and with lesss trength yiou might not even be able to move deopending how much stuff youa re carrying.

 

[Cazzeris]

I wonder what are inXile's plans on working on this game's balance.

 

[jagged-jimmy]

If i was them, i would bugfix and that's it. Too late now. Maybe allow easier modding.

 

[Volourn]

Thegame is better balanced than most games. Chances are, if they try to 'balance' it they'll just dumb it down like idiots want them to.

I think the only thing that needs to be fixed is armour. Plus, allow npcs to use med kits as that's only fair.

 

[Rhalle]

If i was them, i would bugfix and that's it. Too late now. Maybe allow easier modding.

Major change to the stats/skills system is WL3 territory I would imagine.

 

[Morkar Left]

"njuries and the like should stay in effect and only get cured by surgeon or doctors. "

Why? Concussions, in real life, don't usually get 'cured' by doctors. It just requires rest/time depending how serious of a conciussions.

"Currently it never effects anything in my game."

I believe you are understating it. While injuries aren't 'game breakers' but losing stats like -3speed/str can make a difference or losing 3 ap or getting minues to different skills like when you try to basha door and break your hand, your character is now useless in bashing more doors and with lesss trength yiou might not even be able to move deopending how much stuff youa re carrying.

How it's now the ticker only counts down and when there is a new fight / skill check the status effect already disappeared. And it's not logical for gameworld consistency when hitpoints don't regenerate no matter how long you are travelling around while other effects do in a very small time. Nitpicking: less strength doesn't effect doorbashing.

 

[Disgruntled]

I agree on most of the points above. There are a set of very particular skills like demolitions/alarms and yet subpar coverage in other areas like explosives and heavy weapons. And the balance for various factors feels a bit off.
A huge gap also exists with the lack of crossbows, bows and general throwing weapons.

On another note, is there a place where having a silenced weapon gives tactical advantages?
Ive tried it in a random encounter and it still resulted in starting a full scale battle with every enemy aware.