Settable damage modifiers

[Rhodan]

It wound be nice to have some general modifiers in the server variables for PC and/or NPC "strength" modification. I'm working towards having players be much stronger than they are on live - higher AC, greater damage output, and I'm not sure what else yet ;) Spell resistance will likely be left the same or increased only a small amount.

Like many people I played EQ for many years and, if I simply wanted to play standard EQ, I'd just pay the fee and play on Live. While its good that the EQEmu setup is striving to match live (best way for defaults to be IMHO) it would be even better if modifications like this were simply a matter of changing a DB value.

I have a couple of half-formed ideas of how to accomplish this goal

1) Increase base damage by level - if a level 50 gets a base of 40 using a 1HS weapon - roughly [level-10]*5 - increase the multiplier. Same with spells. Of course, it not likely to be THAT simple, but thats the general idea.

2) Change combat calculations to use a a different level than the actor's. A level 20 mage casting a nuke would have the nuke hit/damage calculations done at level 25 (or 15 depending on which way you wanted to go).

Of course, people could always modify items and spells to get greater damage etc, but that is a hell of a lot of work and may end up having to do it all again when EQEmu is upgraded at a later date.

P.S. Oh yeah almost forgot!

Two simple modifications would be to add multipliers for mana and health recovery. Personally, i'd like to increase these at least fourfold - perhaps as much as six times. I'll have to look at limiting "flowing thought" items later, but for non-aug'd/twinked players, the standard rates are just brutal.

[John Adams]

Again, I feel that lowering the NPCs abilities will grant you the same effect as making a character 6x stronger, as they will be easier to hit, take more damage, resist less, and quicker to kill. I like your ideas, but I can't see messing with the Items tables or general game code to accomplish this. Although, with the new Rules system, modifiers can easily be added - but that's a bit of code changing, and who knows what delicate balancing will get broken messing with player stats.

[cbodmer]

I am not sure about stat modifiers personally, I don't feel they are necessary for the reasons John posted. But health/mana/end regen tuning is definetly something I am going to take a look at. Particularly out of combat regen - I don't see a reason to punish my players (virtual players - since I have none) with EQ-like downtime after every fight.

-Chris

[bufferofnewbies]

aye, I agree with you there, cbodmer.

I would like to be able to set one rate of regen during combat and one rate during resting. With the new rules system, it's easier to do. But i believe the current rules only allow a base regen, not a differental one. So, if anything, someone (read as: oh god, I screwed it up, trying to make it, again?!) will have to code the new rules to accept during meditation/ rest times. Yet another thing I need to get better at.. coding.

I prefer to see player vs. mob fights where both sides are roughly equal: more drawn out fights, but less snap reaction type fights where the slightest mistake means a total wipe. It's hard to make a system more skill activated and less gear activated, in a game that became dedicated to Raiders. I'm sure, again, the Rules System would best work to change this. Just finding where all the code is located is half the problem for me.

I'd rather have the resting between the fights minimal compared to the fights themselves. That way the players have more to do than playing /gems in an online game.