Fighter & Warden "Combat Style" Feats

[Gadwin]

Hello, firstly i'd like to say i'm a massive fan of the mechanical changes you've all done across the board, and i'm greatly looking forward to release. Amazing job, really.

Now, there were two minor nitpicks I had and wanted to suggest revisiting- the fighting style feats for Fighter and Warden. For reference:

• Overpower:
  • While wielding a two-handed weapon, there is a 10% chance whenever the Warden successfully parries an attack to reset the cooldown of Gather Courage.
• Shield Wall:
  • While wielding a shield, there is a 5% chance whenever the Warden takes damage to grant 10% physical damage immunity for 1 rounds + 1 round / 6 levels of Warden. If the Warden is below 50% health, this increases to 25%.

• At 18th level the Fighter can choose a fighting style to master. They may only choose one of the following.
  • Whirling Frenzy: While dual-wielding, the Fighter has a 5% chance whenever dealing damage to an enemy for their next 3 attacks to attempt a melee touch attack on all nearby enemies. Each successful touch attack will deal 1d4 damage + their STR modifier.
  • Clustered Shots: Each time the Fighter successfully hits the same target with a ranged attack, they deal an additional +1 damage, stacking up to 6 times and lasting until they change target or the target dies.
  • Furious Focus: While using a two-handed weapon and in Power Attack stance, the first attack of each round ignores the Power Attack penalty to attack bonus. This does not work with Improved Power Attack.
  • Heroic Durability: While using a shield, the Fighter has a 10% chance whenever they take damage to gain DR 10/+2 for 1 round + 1 round / ½ their Constitution modifier, rounded down.

Now, we'll start with warden! I like the idea of using parries to refresh ability cooldowns, it's unique and the payoff is worth it. However, the shield wall one is rare to trigger and comparatively little use until in the "danger zone" HP-wise.

For fighter, we have 2 feats that simply work- those being furious focus and clustered shots. Then there are 2 that have low percentile chances to trigger the ability that also has fail-states.

Whirling Frenzy seems really cool since it gives you three chances of AoE damage that is very hard to avoid, and the 5% chance to proc is alright in light of the fact that dual wielding gives +2 attacks.

Heroic Durability, however, has a chance to proc, and then can be completely useless against foes with +2 weapons. This.. doesn't feel great. Furthermore, it might as well not even exist when people cast stoneskin on you, and it's the only feat here that would be useless for PvP since +2's are our regular cap.


So in my humble opinion, the shield feats for warden and fighter are lacking compared to the others. If I had to make an uneducated suggestion on how to make them feel more rewarding, it would be to try and alter them to either have more of a guarantee, or broaden the benefits. F.E:

-Shield Wall's proc chance when struck from 5% to 10%, given that the effects are mild more often than not

Or,

-Shield Wall spreads to nearby allies.

-Hell, maybe even a mix of both?



Heroic Durability could also be done a number of ways:

-changed from 10/+2 to 5/-, or if we don't want to step on barb's toes;

-give it physical immunity akin to shield wall. Or to retain its identity from shield wall,

-boost the required weapon EB to +3 so that it's only defeated by GMW and artificer weapons, and retain its uniqueness that way. If taking some DR away to make this happen is necessary then I still think it would be better off to have a smaller damage soak that affects more things- perhaps this would be the best option overall since it helps narrow the currently-wide gap in survivability between fighters who do and don't have this feat?

All of these would achieve the same goal of steering further away from the "all or nothing" benefit that it currently gives.


Regardless of takeaway, I remain excited for the server and very much look forward to playing!

 

[Aschent_]

Thanks for the feedback Gadwin! We'll keep a close eye on both those classes during our internal testing and if your perspective turns out to be accurate (in that these feats are lackluster) we'll make some design changes. Even after launch we'll be collecting subjective/objective feedback on the classes and tweak as time progresses.

 

[Khaine]

Hi,

Appreciate the feedback. It's totally fair critique and good points raised, the only thing I can really say is that most of these things were tentative proposals that were put out just to inform everyone of what was being changed. The TDN 11 change required quite a few changes to classes to bring them into balance, so there's definitely going to be things that are out of tune here or there.

To explain the reasoning: percentages in NWN are somewhat difficult to gauge. Obviously you can say 5% = 1 in 20 hits, and of course on the whole as a tank you don't actually want to be getting hit so the ability would not be proccing very often. However, there are plenty of other factors that have to be considered, such as how impactful the ability is when it procs, how much value it is. Since the tank is trying to get hit as little as possible - and if they succeed in that goal - then even 1 in 20 hits would, while rare, also mean that it's just more damage being mitigated over time.. if that makes sense?

The philosophy we're trying to adopt is that we'd rather be on the cautious side with values and have them underperform so that we can buff them later if need be. We'd rather give power later than take it away, as taking away power from people often can lead to complaints, whereas giving power rarely does. Right now, we're in the process of testing the classes and changes we're making to them on the live server, so we're getting a fairly accurate picture of what these abilities actually look like and how they perform in a dungeon environment.

That said, after some testing I've discovered that even Overpower's percentage for the refresh might be way too low. So there's a good chance you're absolutely right and those percentages are far too low for the tank feats. We'll definitely test it and adjust to what we think feels better and matches the kind of usefulness we were hoping from the ability.

Regarding PvP: we're going to try to make it so that no class absolutely dominates in PvP and that no feat is entirely useless, but there's no guarantee we can get it even remotely close to what would resemble 'balance'. NWN is really a terrible game for PvP in my personal opinion, and really we want PvP to drive a narrative and not to be something that people just engage in because of minor slights IC or something like that. So.. we'll try to take things into account if feats are outright useless, but not every feat - even capstones - may necessarily be useful in PvP scenarios. The barbarian's capstone, for example, is almost entirely a PvE focused thing.

Hope that all makes sense, thanks for the interest.

 

[Gadwin]

Thank you both for the quick and helpful responses! I totally understand the "give over take" method of adjusting mechanics and your answers have helped me better understand your creative process.

A quick note on the PvP aspect from my side is that while I do not expect to partake in PvP very much (if at all) because of the wishy-washy and innately imbalanced nature Khaine cited, in the event that I -do-, I just wanted to have the "resilience" aspect of my tank-to-be conveyed through such an interaction, if that makes sense. Even skirmishes between PCs can get people talking about the characters involved, building on their reputation and opening up new oppurtunities for characters to meet and get involved and the like.

My rambling aside, I wish the team all the best, in development and outside of it!