I completely agree, was also going to do a write-up of proposed stat changes but I thought it’d be better to just post under this one.
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I think many have tried to solve this problem. Bethesda’s system where you ‘learn’ stuff by doing (has a lot of potential here as well where you could learn a weapon by using it and have a debuf while you do but when you level the weapon skill up you slowly become proficient) Rise of the Ronin (haven’t played but watched some) has a similar system.
No one has seemed to hit it just right. I think we all agree stats need to do more than dictate what weapon you can use but should benefit the option you choose in some way. I think we all want freedom (and to use that shiny new weapon we just got!!) and stopping us from doing so is a disappointment. I think classless systems are the better option overall but I haven’t seen a definitive way to do it yet. As we can see although we agree we can poke holes into all the arguments for and against.
I do like the affxes to weapons adding ‘int adds to fire damage’ or ‘str adding to weapon speed’. That means you could have a dex build where a ring adds poise damage based on dex stat.
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No I don’t think you understood my rebuttal; of course whatever choice you make will lead you down a path, it’s inevitable. However your suggestion of attributing an element to a stat is further restrictive in terms of what element you chose. I think the elemental bonuses and so on should be a layer on top of the stats you chose but not dictated by them in that way is my point.
I totally understand your point about “what is freedom” because absolute freedom is unachievable in this kind of games. No matter what you do, you will always select something over the other; but I think what the developers meant by freedom is that they want to avoid giving us a class system with predetermined playstyles that are designed for us to follow. They want us to make our own playstyle, however I would argue that at the moment they have failed in doing that; because we are massively restricted by the weapon we chose. Not only that but we need to invest stats in order to use that weapon further restricting us into what we can do with the character.
Enchantments, Gems, Gear, Stats, all these factors don’t really open up playstyle much at the moment. The only differential is your weapon and runes. There’s little to no player self-expression at the moment.
Last Epoch, with it’s class system and skill trees gives us a lot more tools for build expression and theory crafting than No Rest for the Wicked which is kind of ironic.
Anyway, I don’t doubt that Moon studios will make changes in the right direction but as it is right now; im hoping they understand that they are not entirely achieving what they set out to do yet.
I really believe my proposal, even though not perfect it’s pretty good at solving the issue with stats in a very easy way (they could be implemented in a day potentially if they wanted). Removing the stat restriction from weapons is a big part of that; plus a change like this would allow for other changes that could further enhance it.
For example, giving us more options for movesets such as being able to do combos such as light attack, charge attack, light attack which would change your moveset for example.
I got tons of ideas and solutions as I’m a game designer myself but whether the devs wish to take my input that’s a different story.
I’m at least hopeful that bringing discussion and bringing light to the issues will improve the game down the line.
I agree that you should be able to wield every weapon. That’s probably what feels the worst right now. Especially considering some weapons requirements are counter intuitive (42 int for icebreaker - a two handed great sword) make it make sense…
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I really like very much your idea!
I also believe it would be better if weapons didn’t have requirements, or if they did, these requirements should be relatively low and not represent an insurmountable barrier. I’ve made a post where I proposed some suggestions to give statistics a more significant impact beyond just granting access to specific weapons.
I’ll share it here, hoping that some of the ideas might be well received and considered.
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Strength: Investing points in strength could directly influence carrying capacity. Each point could grant the ability to carry 2 additional weight points. Additionally, strength could passively influence any form of physical damage, adding 10 or 20% of the total strength value to physical damage inflicted regardless of weapon scaling.
At the same time, the attribute could have a greater impact on the shove obtained when in heavy load, inflicting more damage to the balance and thus influencing even heavier enemies. Additionally, it could also affect the mechanics of charged attacks, further increasing their damage or speeding up their charge time.
It would be nice to have a unique animation for charged attacks for characters with a high strength score. -
Dexterity: This attribute could passively influence the speed of certain animations. For example, it could make the activation of consumables and runes faster, improve movement and sprint speed, allow for wider dodges, and provide a bonus to backstab damage.
Unlocking the ability to punish staggered enemies with a riposte once a high dexterity score is reached would be desirable. -
Intelligence: This attribute could function similarly to strength. Each point invested in intelligence could increase concentration by 2.
Additionally, the attribute should influence any form of magical damage (Runes), adding 10/20% of its total value to damage.
Intelligence could also affect spell casting speed and further amplify damage.
Obtaining unique magical effects by casting charged spells with a high intelligence score would be desirable. -
Faith: This attribute could influence the effectiveness and duration of buffs.
A character with a higher faith score should be able to provide better healing and buffs to themselves and their allies.
Faith should also affect the speed at which concentration is recovered. Additionally, faith should influence elemental damage inflicted, equal to 10/20% of the total attribute value.
It would be desirable for a high faith score to grant access to additional rune slots.
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Right now we have 4 stats which don’t really do anything and we have a number of elemental damage types which (unless I missed something) we have no method of interacting with. Marrying the two is just a proposed method of solving both problems in a way that isn’t usually done, giving the player the chance to pick an elemental identity as part of their build. Again, not necessarily trying to say any specific changes are right or wrong as long as we can all acknowledge that the stats really should have some identity outside of just a damage increase for a niche of weapons.
I think getting the devs to implement some kind of change to the stat is far more important than being attached to your specific changes.
To give more specific criticism: increasing attack speed with dex, for instance, means almost every build probably wants some dex. We all like to attack faster, and while I agree it’s fun it can also unbalance the game extremely rapidly. As someone else mentioned, strength increasing poise damage could be disastrous if not implemented correctly and would have to be done as a percentile increase off the base weapon. Intelligence increasing focus gain seems fine, if not bland, and faith reducing rune cost isn’t that different from intelligence increasing focus gain.
Patren mentioned strength increasing the power of charge attacks and I like that significantly more, if dexterity increases light attacks then suddenly we have two stats that have significant playstyle identity without impacting the feel of gameplay. If we can adjust weapon scaling or even stat requirements at the forge then we have stronger character identity without any sacrifice of build diversity. Maybe intelligence can increase focus, as you suggested, and faith can increase the strength of rune casts instead of providing cost reduction. That’s four unique playstyle identities (players that spam attacks, players that want to smash, players that spam abilities, players that want big, flashy abilities) all available without any loss of “freedom”.
And just to reiterate: I’m not particularly attached to the specifics of any proposed change, I feel like the primary goal here should be to get the dev’s attention so that we at least get those stats to do something. Any increase in character identity is a win, imo.
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Thanks for chipping in!
Yeah believe I mentioned that they should remove the stat requirements too.
Your ideas seem to lean towards the way souls games do them. Such as STR increasing your equip capacity and so on. It does makes sense on the strength one in particular, but I think it would make the Equip load stat a bit worse, but I’m not sure if it’s necessarily a bad idea.
Overall, I think your ideas make a lot of sense and is similar to my proposal. However I think my version is a little bit more straight forward and simple. But yeah, im not 100% on my proposal for the faith stat so it’s interesting to hear other people’s ideas.
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Yeah I understand that the devs will most definitely not implement my proposed design that’s fairly obvious to me. We are on the same page that we want to get the devs to implement changes to stats (which they are apparently).
About the criticism, I think that in terms of balance it’s pretty obvious that it needs to be calibrated so that it’s not too strong on specific cases.
You gave the example of attack speed being very desirable for every build, but I disagree with that assessment and ill tell you why.
Getting more attack speed is very good, sure; but you have to keep in mind that you can only get so many attacks in before the enemy will start swinging at you so you will have to back out at some point; at most you get one or two hits, maybe three if you invest heavily in depending on the weapon animation.
If you put the design in a vacuum, then it might feel completely broken but when you consider other factors then it starts to come together a lot better.
For strength for example, the strategy is very different, what strength wants to do is to look for openings to build up that poise and then be able to punish enemies when vulnerable.
Now if you go for both Dex and Strength you can take advantage of both things, a higher attackspeed with higher poise build up to knock down the opponent, and thats a totally valid strategy if you wish so.
However, i do agree that it needs to be implemented properly, and what that means is to give enemies different conditions to deal with different types of builds. Such as enemies that high high poise resistance, making the strength strategy a bit worse, but make raw attack speed and rune abilities look more lucrative and so on.
Everything has to be contextual, so I believe that when taking these suggestions into account or when making your own you need to asses the implications to hopefully make the best possible design or suggestion.
Anyhow, I do agree that my Int and Faith proposals feel very similar, and to be honest they are because of the systems of the game right now. I couldn’t come up with a better suggestion for them yet so it’s interesting to see what people come up with.
I do think that my suggestion is overall pretty good; but some things probably should change. Then again, it doesn’t really matter because I know they wont be implemented and it’s meant to be a rough design draft to get the discussion going anyway.
For what it’s worth, if the devs said we can have only the current system or your proposed changes I’d take your changes on the spot, no questions asked lol. The thing about dex increasing speed is that the game has a variety of on-hit affixes. I have ones that give both health and stamina back on hit which continue to me to seem bonkers in how broken they are. My rapier’s rapid thrust returns my stamina back to full along with most of my health, when you suggest dexterity increase attack speed all I can think about is my character thrusting infinitely at mach speed. If I get my hands on additional poise damage at the same time then it’s GG, I already stagger enemies fairly quickly imo. I don’t think some of your changes completely account for things that are already in the game is the main problem I had with them, along with the stats inadvertently doing the same things.
I already mentioned int/faith kind of being the exact same thing, but in a way your proposed dex change is actually just a better str since you’re hitting more and, consequently, doing more poise damage. The on-hit stamina affix gives you the invested stamina back and, even if you were to remove it, the player can simply stack stamina buffs and do tons of poise damage with fast attacks that way. Every build loves to stagger the enemy for free damage, the majority of players like their attacks to be fast, your proposed changes very likely create a meta involving lots of dex. Which isn’t necessarily a problem, but personally I think devs should be reluctant to let the player mess with the speed of their animations in games with combat like this . Stuff can get broken very, very quickly.
Obviously if you say “well they just have to balance it” I can’t really argue but that’s true of just about any proposed stat changes, I feel like the ideal proposed changes wouldn’t necessitate an overhaul of most of the currently existing enemies and I fear that’s what your system would likely require. The alternative would be to implement your changes as written but make their effects minute so as not to upset the current game balance, which I don’t think would be a satisfying implementation. While the int/faith ones aren’t super exciting, I do think they could be implemented as written without really changing anything else.
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Yeah for the attack speed, I think on hit effects would be really good, and I think that would be fun. There are ways to make it balanced tho, for example making really fast weapons such as dual daggers to give very little poise build up, therefore becoming more of “on hit” strategy friendly rather than poise buildup. Alternatively, something like a mace could have good poise build up but not as much attack speed yet still benefit from it.
The other thing that would need to be done is to make healing on hit work as health back from damage, and to be fair if you can heal back to full health from a flurry that’s okay, but you should have to invest heavily on it and therefore suffering in other areas. For example, having high attack speed that heals you back to full, but having low health pool; and don’t forget that stamina is also an issue, the faster you attack the more stamina you consume. So i think it’s really not that difficult to balance. You want to make things be strong, but also have drawbacks imo.
Another thing that I would do is to change how weapons work, quite a bit so it would accommodate my design proposal. Such as adding, backstab damage as a stat, armor penetration and things like that. Plus rebalancing the weapon stats.
I have really thought this through, I bet you can give me almost any scenario and I could balance things around it. And yes, there will be things that are really good, maybe high attack speed with on-hit stamina but you can always tweak the numbers, and remember you can attack as fast as you want, but if you do; you will get hit. The only scenario that could be really broken and game-breaking is if poise build-up + attack speed is too high, but then again you simply need to tweak the numbers of poise build-up and attack speed.
For Int, Faith though; im not 100% sure about them but I think the Focus gain seems pretty straight forward and could work.
Anyway, it’s just an interesting game design exercise for me and I do think that my proposal could be easy to implement and balance around; however we could get something better too.
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