Skill/Leveling rebalance feedback thread

[Kryxx]

[quote=“PropaneSoup, post:7, topic:9237”]After getting some time to play with the new system, I can say that I like it much more than the old system. Increasing my skills feels a little more challenging, while at the same time, finishing large projects is very rewarding with it’s exp gain. I do wish for two things, I fear neither of which are easy to do:
Being able to partially start a project, do some other things, and then resume the same project later.
Having crafting give you exp while you’re working on it, not all at the end.
These would drastically help the really high level fab recipes that can take an entire day to complete.[/quote]

Or get interrupted. I hate that. 10 hrs on a project and 5min from the end something interrupts you.

A prompt to ‘Continue the last crafting from where you left on. This is your only chance. (y/n)?’

reasoning is that you have all of the supplies spread out etc, and starting something new means moving all of that hence you’ll have to start over on the project.

[troll_from_behind]

Could you add a partilly constructed object to the reality bubble that remembers how close it is from beign completed?
This way one could do something else instead if the need arises and not lose the materials and time invested.

[kevin.granade]

That’s a good idea, extending it a bit we could make crafting fully incremental, so every turn you spend moves, gain skill xp, and update the ‘in-progress’ item, and occasionally consume an item.
The items consumed so far could be added to the in progress item as well, so even if an item you intended to use were destroyed before you use it, you could leave, get a new one, come back, and finish the item.
You might even be able to start crafting before you have everything, and crafting would stop when you run out of ingredients for the item.
This might also provide a solution for the problem of automating assembly of subcomponents. Say you have a bunch of thread you want to make into a rope, but you have to turn the thread into string first. If you try and craft a rope, it could see that you don’t have any string, and try to apply the recipe to make it, it finds the thread and starts crafting string, and whenever it has string, it adds it to the rope until either the rope is done or you run out of thread. Determining whether you have enough subcomponents to make something through an arbitrary set of recipes is a very hard problem for a computer, but if we do it incrementally it’s possible.

[Valpo]

I like that train of thought.

Sounds like a cubic ton of work though?

[kevin.granade]

Yea, it would be quite a lot, but no particular piece is that hard, and it breaks down nicely into separate features, so it’s at least manageable. The payoff is really nice though, this is something I’ll work on if no one beats me to it (that’s not going to be any time soon though, a light map overhaul, hordes, and probably several other things would come first)

[Zireael]

To keep thinking positive: z-levels seemed like a metric ton of work, too, but Coolthulhu has broken them up into little chunks

[Eliijahh]

I still have to play the new addition, and I was wondering, does the skill rust changes in the new skill system?

[Coolthulhu]

As for the partial crafting: it could probably be made much easier by having the partially constructed item be an item.

That way it could be moved around, canceled (deconstructed), restarted (just activate it), have construction progress stored and saved as item parameters etc.

[kevin.granade]

Oh yea, I was assuming it would be an item instead of a new type of object.

[SgtStens]

The idea of partially crafted items also has possibilities for half-build projects found in basements, garages, etc. Maybe finding a half-built widget could give you a chance at completing it and/or learning the recipe.

[SteeleMatrix]

The idea of partially crafted items also has possibilities for half-build projects found in basements, garages, etc. Maybe finding a half-built widget could give you a chance at completing it and/or learning the recipe.

I like that idea. Going into a basement and seeing a half built insert project here as if the previous occupant had a hobby he/she never got to complete.

[BeerBeer]

Handguns seem to develop slower than other gun skills. Anyone else observing this?

What’s the current mechanic again? Is XP gain always based on inflicted damage for guns? Maybe base the system on range for handguns, rewarding more XP for hitting targets at the furthest ranges of a handgun? Then again, that would mean that Rivtech handguns (bullets) would need to be revamped, since their ranges are enormous. Or maybe just reward more XP for those unlikely shots, but with a cap. Should gun skills each have a different approach for XP gain?

I experienced this on version 3204 or 3218. My character had accumulated nice gun skills through an amount of experience that I found fair - rifles (10), shotguns (7), SMGs (7), but then handguns (4), which IMO is way off compared to how much I had used pistols. It should’ve been right there with rifles, I feel.

I guess I also wish the game kept a weapon usage record of some sort? Attacks performed for each weapon category, number of bullets fired, hit percentage, total damage inflicted, average damage per shot, average difficulty of fired shots, average range of fired shots, number of low damage or zero damage hits, number of critical hits… that sort of stuff, in a separate TXT file, for later gawking.

[Kiralio]

New system gives ranged skill XP for two things: range and accuracy (old one only for accuracy). This range scaling is quite strong, which is why shotguns lag behind everything else.

Can you explain this in more depth? I came back to Cataclysm after last playing around the release of 0.6 and I intensely dislike how gaining ranged combat skill works now, insofar as I understand it (which is not very well.)

It used to be you could pick the best weapon available to you at your stats and crafting skill, use it, and you would get better at using it. This was a good system – it worked intuitively and meant that just playing normally would eventually get you where you needed to be. Melee (as far as I can tell) still works this way, but when I try to use a bow with an average-statted character I get no skill gain at all, and the only advice I could find on my own was “just use a blowgun to train,” which worked, but means that if I want to improve my archery I have to use a separate non-optimal weapon and grind levels against weak enemies.

[Coolthulhu]

Under the old system, the best way to gain skills would be to only attack at point blank. Attacking stuff at range was a very suboptimal way to gain skills.

The new system requires far more xp to gain levels, but compensates for it by increasing skill gain based on distance. Meaning that the xp gain isn’t maximized at point blank, but at the longest range you can keep scoring good enough hits.

Also, you need more perception to keep improving skills with inaccurate weapons.

Archery is relatively badly implemented at the moment and needing to use the blowgun wasn’t intended. I don’t recall anyone describing a good solution to this, though.
Self-bow was supposed to be the archery training weapon, but under the current system it doesn’t work. Self-bow was never properly implemented though, so the blowgun is actually a step forward here. Both of those should probably be removed and short bow should be enabled earlier.

[Kiralio]

Also, you need more perception to keep improving skills with inaccurate weapons.

Thanks, it sounds like this might have been a big part of what I was missing. So, boiling this down to pure “what do I care about as a player” – is there a cap on this, or could you share the formula? How high would my perception need to be to use (X) gun or bow and be able to (eventually) train the skill to at least 10?

[Coolthulhu]

Formula is something like:
weapon_dispersion + ammo_dispersion < skill_dispersion + type_offset + 15 * rng( 0, perception )
If this is true, skill is trained

Weapon and ammo are displayed on the item.
Skill dispersion is (10 - skill)*45 + (10 - marksmanship)*15
Type offset is a hardcoded variable: 135 for archery, 195 for throwing (sling but not slingshot), 0 for everything else. This makes bows and slings easier to gain skill in.
rng(x, y) is a random value from x to y (including both x and y).

The skill gain itself depends on how good the hit was: headshot exp is proportional to range, less accurate shots give less exp: [headshot exp]/2 for good shot, then headshot/3, then /4, then /5.
Any shot that trains the skill (even if it is a total miss) also gives some flat exp, dependent weakly on burst size.

[Kiralio]

So to (slowly, and relying very heavily on the RNG for the last level or two) reach level 10 with a Reflex Recurve bow (120 dispersion) firing Fletched Sharpened Metal Arrows (285 dispersion) I would need a Perception of 15 or greater.

Is that correct?

(I know those are actually very inaccurate arrows and so not ideal in any case, I mention them only because that’s what I was using when I wasn’t able to train at all and couldn’t tell why.)

[Coolthulhu]

Looks like 18 to me (assuming you want both archery and marksmanship):

120 + 285 <= 0 + 135 + 15 * x
270 <= 15 * x
18 <= x

(I got the formula a tiny bit wrong in the earlier post, it’s <= not <)

[Rivet]

I’m thinking that perhaps we could avoid a lot of the weird breaking points where you stop being able to raise a weapon skill because of stats or dispersion by having it so if you fail to meet those minimum requirements you still gain skill, just at a reduced rate - instead of not being able to raise it at all.

[kevin.granade]

Which leads to the equivalent complaint that leveling is “strangely slow” or similar. It doesn’t fix the perceived problem, and now you have something encouraging you to just grind more instead of doing something about it.