» Fri Jun 08, 2012 6:59 pm Part 2: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1289512-bethesda-why-must-we-rebalance-your-game-for-you-part2/
TD;LR: Why do I have to choose how to build my character in function of how hard I want the game to be instead of how I want to play?
Crafting is out of control: If i want to make a warrior and still have a challenge, I can't use all three crafting professions (and even 2 is iffy). The synergies between them are so powerfull that they make the very idea of min/maxing as a type of gameplay completely absurd. You cannot take the best character developpement decisions, the ones you know you need to be the best at what you are doing, without turning the game into Hello-Kittie-Adventure as far as difficulty goes.
Destruction is a flippin' joke: The tree does not scale! That means that, unlike every single other combat ability in the game, there is a point after which you will -never- hit harder, while everything keeps scaling up. What that means is that we have a situation where a destruction mage, at a certain level, will actually do more damage with -unperked- bows then with -fully perked- destruction spells. Now it wouldn't be a that big a deal if that level was very late, but that level is 35. On a game with 81 levels in total, you will always hit as hard as a level 35 mage.
What that means is that mages are forced to turn themselves into summoners by taking up conjuration, effectively completely changing the gameplay and restricting their possible options. And guess what: Even that doesn't scale!
Illusion trivalizes the game: Here is a skill I am quite happy to see finally shine... except they overdid it! It trivializes all form of content, same as crafting synergies. The problem is that there is no element of damage nor resistance involved. What that means is that once you have the master spells and the appropriate perks, you can just invis in, frenzy, invis out and grab a popcorn. Then just calm + shoot the last man standing. Nothing can resist it, nothing can counter it, nothing can mitigate it. With destruction spells you need to kite, with arrows you sneak, with weapons you need to stagger them first if they have a shield or are blocking, etc. Illusion is an "IWIN" button; the only strat is "press it".
There is no incentive to ever wear robes: Even as a mage, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear more then a single piece of robes, because you gain absolutely nothing from wearing them over a light armor piece with the same enchant. If I have a cloth glove with -20% cost to Destruction spells, and a light armor with -20% cost to Destruction spells, then there will never be a question that the Light armor piece will be superior. Sure there is the Alteration perk, but again, the mage issue: it stops scaling really fast, and then falls behind. Hell, all the masks (best mage helmets) in the game are Light Armor!
As it stands the only Cloth piece worth wearing over anything else is the Robes from the College quest line, because you cannot reproduce its stats through other means.
Some perks are made pointless by the very game they are in: I am looking specifically at Lockpicking and Speech-crafting here. The issue is that one is made redundant by the ability one has to open any lock he see's from level one, while the other serves as nothing more then a source of income since its gameplay value is rendered moot by the option of bribing everyone as an alternative to persuade/intimidate options. I would understand if one was to tell me they are there for roleplaying reasons, but the fact is that Speechcrafting has nothing to do with roleplaying since the quests offers little to no option in terms of alternative developpement. You cant talk people into doing stuff, you cant talk your way out of situations. The RP value of it is greatly diminished by the game's lack of real "choices" when questing.
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I keep reading on this forum about how the game is supposed to be about Choice...
Then why is it that every time someone brings up any of these points they are told to just not use them? So far, if I had listened to these boards, I would say that I cannot use: Enchanting, Smithing, Alchemy, Illusion, Destruction, Sneak and Dual Wield. Those are just the ones that I have personally read here.
Doesn't that actually restrict my choices considerably?!?
Yes, you should be able to become God if you want to, but you should also be able to have a good level of challenge as well if you want to. You should not have to restrict your own options to keep the game interesting, if anything, that is sort of killing it for me (as in, my opinion, I know its not everyone's).
Isnt there already a difficulty bar setting?!?
What is the point of there being a difficulty setting if the acutal in-game difficulty is dictated by wether you chose the OP or the UP build? You want the game to be very easy? Shouldn't you obtain that by putting the setting on "very easy" ("Novice")? You want the game to be very hard? Shouldn't you obtain that by putting the setting on "very hard" ("Master")?
Yes, there will be mods. Tons and tons of mods. I play on Xbox. I will never get to use a single one of them, yet I paid the same price for my game.
P.S. sorry for the typing/grammar/spelling mistakes, english is not my first language.
For the sake of the game's integrity, if you choose a certain difficulty, then the game should strive to maintain that difficulty as much as possible regardless of how you build your character. It's common sense. If you want to feel overpowered, you can always opt for the novice difficulty. But those that enjoy balanced gameplay have no recourse because even on master many builds can one-shot monsters.
So the choice (for warriors) appears to be:
1. Level naturally and create an overpowered monster.
2. Research how not to play, and build a balanced character.
3. Don't level at all and force challenge.
1. Level naturally and create an overpowered monster.
2. Research how not to play, and build a balanced character.
3. Don't level at all and force challenge.
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EDIT: It was pointed out to me that I had not explicitely expressed any suggestions or ideas as to how to fix the issues I am describing. That person was quite right, so I decided to do just that. Keep in mind those are just my own personnal opinion, and therefore I can only offer my own experience and reasoning as a justification. Not everyone will agree, and I accept that. Thats why forums are there to discuss those things. :
1) Crafting: Crafting needs to be brought in line. There is no other cross-tree synergy in the game, so the fact that those 3 trees do share them makes them inherently more powerfull then anything else in the game. Remove them, or at least put a cap on it. But lets say we ignore the exploit issue and leave it as is for the sake of people enjoying it, we still need to tune down the regular crafting's potency because they simply bring too much. There are two ways of doing that:
- You can reduce the power of the resulting items/enchants
- You can make it harder to obtain the best items
I personally would advocate a mix of both. Reduce enchant's potency for 1h/2h % damage chants, while making it harder to obtain maximum level smithing by making the experience gain corellate to the item's material worth, for exemple, or by making the materials for the best items rather rare and/or hard to find.
2) Destruction: Make destruction spells do a bit more damage for every level in the Destruction skill, and introduce the magic skills' equivalents of + % damage enchants through the Enchanting tree.
3) Illusion: introduce Resists to the game, so that it remains a challenge. If you pop frenzy, but say 1 mob or 2 still stick to you because they resist it, then you have to start reacting by kiting, using various spell effects, etc. Those resists can be adjusted with the difficulty level selected by the slider, preserving the god-mode feeling as an available option.
4) Robes: Let there be an advantage to using robes. If Alteration actually scaled, that would not be such a problem because then you would get good amounts of mitigation at high levels through Mage Armor. Another way would be to make wearing full robes give you an inherant or casted bonus (perhaps through deep alteration perk?), like a big magika regen bonus or a -% cost to all spell bonus, something that will be noti?able enough that one could actually consider Alteration as the robe wearer's "Armor skill".
5) For Speechcrafting, I would implement actual options through the game that one could use actively to complete the game's various objectives. That would include giving Speechcrafting perkers options to complete quests differently, talking themselves out of fights with ennemies like bandits, manipulating/tricking people into helping you, or to achieve your own selfish goals. I do not think that damage and big bangs are the only important things: quite the contrary, I would kill to see speechcraft become a valid way of completing the game without always resorting to violence, as it currently is the case.
As for Lockpicking, its a bit more complicated because you have to consider that you cannot put a limit on the level of the locks themselves (ex: requires 67 Lockpicking to open, or requires Expert Lockpicking perk to open) without limiting the sandbox experience (altho it would be the perfect solution in another setting). In all realism, the only way I see to make the tree more impacting on the gameplay, without just merging it with another like sneak, would be to make unlocking something dangerous. If it did not "pause" the game, or if there were various traps on locks, then one could quickly see the value of a tree that would offer perks countering those dangers (slows time by 75% 3/3 while LPing, -% chance to spring traps, can disactivate traps, etc).
