After playing for about 40h ++, I found the stat system really weird and unintuitive. This is both for the characters attribute and weapon scaling system.
First of all
- I understand that this comes with the souls-genre and have purposes. Which is why I am holding on to this thought (that I have since Wicked Inside) until I think I have enough information about the system.
- I appreciate the soft class system and I think this is one of the most promising system that have potential for really flexible builds. Sadly the implementation of the stats system make me anxious about committing stats just to experiment with it.
- While I understand respeccing and its purpose. I’m with the devs about it being scarce or expensive to make player’s decision have matter more. And I think respeccing is not a solution for the problem.
- I’m not writing this to bash the game. I love the game and the sole purpose of this post is to make it better. Also, sorry for poor English.
Now to the stats system. I personally found it unintuitive and serve no real purpose while being anxiety inducing. The case i would be giving below would be based on devs’ intention of player having flexible class system with room to experiment and creating their own unique classes. Unfortunately the current system contradicts that.
Let me explain with an examples.
Say, I play the game and found a cool great sword. It was Gnarled Saw and It needs 22 STR to equip it, so you level up and spend points in STR, since it was needed and scale with the sword, making it stronger. I like great sword play style and intend to stick with it. Some time later, I found another cool great sword, Blister, that need 26 STR and 26 INT. So I level up and spend the points into INT to wield the weapon.
Later, I found another great sword, Summer Sting, that needs 26 STR and 26 FTH. That’s weird. But since I like the sword and it comes with a good buffs, I level up and spend points in FTH. Until I realize that the 26 points I spend on INT is basically wasted. that’s 26/3 => 6.6 levels being useless.
I restarted the play through and trying to focus on daggers, since it’s fast and cool. But since I know that in the future I might find another cool dagger with unknown stats requirement, I hold on to the attribute points and only using it when I confident that I have enough to spare on other stats.
From that example above, the stats system creates this problems:
- Stats being unusable when I switch weapon with different requirements/scaling create anxiety of wasting precious stats on things that will not matter. Leading to players hoarding up attribute points for the weapons that might not exist (except if you open up Wiki).
- This creates an unintuitive system where a sword requires 42 INT.
- It gives illusion of you can swap/experiment class, but in reality, you can only switch to classes (weapons) that you have stats for. Except of course, if you have no problem with stats being wasted. Which I personally don’t like. Just to make sure, I stand with the devs when they said that they want player’s choice to matter. But I don’t think this is the way to enforce it.
I’ve thrown this issue several times and there are response like:
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This is an early access, everything will change when it hits 1.0
Sure, that’s why I’m giving feedback like this
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This is how Souls genre work
I know. But I don’t know how it make sense in No Rest for The Wicked. I haven’t finished any Souls game, but I think what I wrote above have issues whatever it’s based on
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This game created with melee battle in mind, so everything have to be melee focused, even gaining focus to be used in ranged attack
I understand and respect that. But even so, them most broken build at this moment is ranged build with bow or staffs. So it clearly needs adjustment anyway.
Now, I want to give feedback on how it should be done in my opinion and the reason behind it. I believe this is still adhere to devs’ vision. I’m not a game designer by any means. I know and believe my feedback have mistakes flaws that I haven’t found the solution. But here it comes.
1. Streamlining Stats
First of all, I love how “simple” and “old school” NRFTW feels. No massive numbers thrown, no over cluttered damage numbers and resistance. And I like how attacks connected or missed solely on player’s skill, not an “evasion” stats. It really makes me feel that I’m dodging because of my skill, but not because I over leveled and put it all into evasion or luck.
All things considered, I still think the system is complicated because it’s unintuitive. Like I said above, I might have low sword based attack because the weapons actually needs INT and your STR have no effect on it.
Now that I think about it, STR in this game is not necessarily Strength, but more of a X weapons mastery. with INT being Y weapons mastery, etc.
What I propose is:
- Don’t scale the weapons based on arbitrary stats. But tie it to 1 stats only for that.
- For example. STR scales with melee damage, INT scales with magic, DEX scales with ranged attack, and Faith scales with defense, resistance, and/or buff/debuff.
- To take things further, all HP related stuff like total HP and HP regen could scale with STR, attack/movement speed scale with DEX, total focus and focus regen with INT, and poise defense and debuff recovery with FTH.
- Stamina could be streamlined to STR or combination of stats, but I’m still not sure about this.
- With this, we only have STR, INT, DEX, FTH, and Stamina to worry about, and all of those stats actually contributes something to your character.
- Weapons requirement can still exist albeit with adjustment. For example, a dagger’s damage still scales with STR, but it could have substantial amount of DEX to wield.
- Lastly, the rune attack should have it’s own scaling stats. For example, a slashing rune attack scales with STR while arrow multi shot scales with DEX. Fireball scales with INT, etc,
With this suggestion, it still give flexibility to character classes while player’s still have consequences to stats they choose. Let’s role play a bit.
Say I want to be an archer, so I picked up a bow and focus on DEX. The consequences I would have is weak dagger attack (understandable since I am an archer) and low HP (understandable since I’m a glass cannon). But my arrow hits a ton. When I feel that my HP is too low, I could always spend the next points to my STR, trading damage with HP.
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“But I couldn’t switch to be a mage if I focus to DEX like that”.
I agree, that’s the weakness of my suggestion and the consequences of spending stats like that.
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“Archer basically under powered because the have low INT, therefor have less focus to be used”.
I also agree. Perhaps there could be another way for archer to attack using focus while not needing to raise INT. For example, giving all two handed bow (if any) bonus INT/focus while giving one handed bow little focus, since they still can rely on their main hand weapon to gain focus. Short bows are for medium range anyway. This is to prevent abuse from mage with 1 handed staff equipping 1 handed bow just for its INT.
But those things aside, there wouldn’t be any scenario where a character is good at all things. For example, in current state (afaik) you could focus on DEX with Tortured Blade, Jacknife, or Needle Spear as your main weapon, while having Laquered Bow on your offhand. All of those weapons scales with DEX with 42 DEX minimum requirement. Basically great at close (dagger/katana), medium (spear), and long (bow) range attacks.
I’m pretty sure there’s some thing I missed since I typed this kinda in a hurry. But that’s the gist of it. Every stats have consequences but nothing wasted. Also no anxiety that holds spending stats altogether.
2. Have melee / range / magic attacks, regardless of weapons
While I do understand and love that NRFTW focused on weapons, I do think should be supplements outside of weapons. Iirc, the devs right now are testing whether basic archery and casting magic should cost focus or not. I do believe they still need it, but it needs another means to attack.
Melee is the easiest since we have all of that already with punches and suplexes, the damage, of course, should scale with STR. With magic, there could be basic magic tomes that could be learned and the magic can then be used without catalyst. The basic fireball tomes, for example, could be given at the tutorial area, provides player to cast fireball with damage that scales with INT/FTH depending on the spell. Ranged attack is a bit iffy, since it needs projectile, which is an item. In that case, there could be variety of throw able items like rocks, shuriken, throwing knifes, etc that have their own “damage” but scales with DEX, obviously. IMO it shouldn’t cost focus, but the projectile would be lost or have % possibility of being retrieved as dropped items.
First of all, the reason for this is just simply fun and immersive. Few days after the launch, we’ve seen people running naked killing Warrick with just kicks. Imagine the other weird build. It also opens other classes like Ninja, Pitcher, etc. More so, it opens other classes to learn things they shouldn’t. For example, an assassin casting fireball, swordman throwing rocks or casting an FTH buff, etc. Albeit, understandably and supposedly, would be weaker than other classes that focused on those things.
There are others I have thought but can’t remember at the moment, but that should be it for now. I write this with good faith and no intention other than to improve the game.
Lastly, please nerf backstab! It’s too OP at the moment. I need around 40 slashes to kill the Plague Doctor at one point, but only 3 backstab, doing it with grunts one hit kills them. Not to mention you’re invulnerable while doing so, with stamina regen to ensure you can dodge out in a 1 vs many situations. It’s so OP that I’m feeling guilty doing it. Parry needs a lot more skill to execute, while giving players little reward. While you can dodge infinitely (if not attacking) to wait for opportunity to backstab (that’s not hard to find). Buff parry (needs more thought) and nerf backstab!