Are there enough skill points to create proper diversity?

[Gatester]

I am working on a few extensive suggestions, but something that would really help is a general opinion on the following ideal for AO. Is there a large enough range of skill values in AO to create proper diversity between and within setups?

The differences between high and moderate evade professions can be only a few hundred evades at the most with short term perks making up a bulk of the difference. Attack rating for a high AR profession can be 3500 and a moderate one is 3300 and low is 3100?

Keeping the ratios the same, would it be easier to balance professions if we had double our current skill values as an example? This might not need to apply to all areas either, as inits, runspeed, tradeskills, etc will likely be unnecessary to change (exceptions with weapons like the AMEP for engineers can be adjusted with attack skill changes).

I personally think that the difference between what is a high value and what is a low value is too close and makes balancing difficult, so what does everyone else feel?

[Boltgun]

When it comes to evades, it doesn't work right in my opinion.

Some profession have bad evades and working on increasing them by, let's say, 50 isa waste of time.

At the opposite some had so much evades that it became painful to attack them unless you use aimed shot, that was somewhat fixed at LE by giving attack rating to most.

For perks it's worse, you have perkable, or you are not. There is no real check for them (and by extension to items).

In my opinion, the range of the hit and miss calculations should be larger. Give some tools for evaders to handle unlucky situations, but otherwise give people some return for their stats, even if they were low or high to start with.

[Jekonam]

Attack rating for a high AR profession can be 3500 and a moderate one is 3300 and low is 3100?

3100 low? Dear pumpkin messiah. MA's need all the love they can get according to your scaling.

[Xtremtech]

This is an interesting question. Broadly, I can see your point, that hit/miss ratios should perhaps be more affected by skill in some way. You need to be a little careful straight off the bat, because people in AO generally tend to quite considerably underestimate their miss-rates. There's actually a wider range in hit/miss calculations than most people recognise.

Like Boltgun, I too would suggest that if you were to attempt something like this, it would be better to alter the weightings on the hit/miss calculation than it would be to try to alter the skills values. Altering the calculation itself is better for future proofing. If it's built into the root equation then balancing to accomodate change every time skills-budgets move isn't so necessary.

But there are issues here. The reality is that the range of AR is very, very much wider than you suggest. 220 PvP MPs at present, for example, will generally have AR more around 2300-2500. Certainly nowhere near the 3100 you mention as a low AR figure. You also need to think about the variation in defence skill - which is also considerably wider across different professions. Both offence and defence are equally a part of the overall equation and emphasising skill variance even mor in the hit/miss calculations would have a considerable effect on overall balance of non-specialists.

Perhaps there might be some opportunity, to suggest weighting the hit/miss calculation based on profession. So you might add in an extra weight on the offence side of the calculation for weapon specialists - but also add in extra weight on the defence side of the calculation for defence oriented professions...

There's also another thing to keep in mind: as you widen the range of hit/miss calculations, you also tend to push still further toward cookie-cutter builds. Professions are quite restricted already as to which weapons types may be considered viable, due to restricted perk and buff access among other things. If you give even more weight to the skills that can establish a wider gap between attack and defence... then the secondary or unusual weapon options for a profession become even weaker options.

[Ocene]

I think when you get amazing evades or AAD, your AAO should be compromised.. not the case today.

I know fixers with more AAO than me..and I will exchange my reflects for their 6K+ AAD any day.

[Gatester]

3100 low? Dear pumpkin messiah. MA's need all the love they can get according to your scaling.

It was a broad example, but for infantry or artillery professions, 3100 attack rating is low for an end-game build. Professions or setups that are not built around attack rating are irrelevant. However, finding some statement where I claim all professions with 3100 attack rating or lower cannot perform in pvp at all and should be given massive benefits is something I am having a bit of trouble locating.



I have not asked for any physical changes, only an increase in the size of the values FC would be working with. Doubling all values would be the maximum I could see FC bothering with, but also easier to manage. The increase could be any amount as long as the difference between great, good, average, bad, and non-effective was large enough to make seperations between toolsets more prevelant.

So I am not actually suggesting that anything be altered, just values to be scaled proportionally higher. What I would foresee this allowing is that when FC does have higher values to work with, they could properly adjust professions skills to create true variation between professions.

[Louderer789]

3100 low? Dear pumpkin messiah. MA's need all the love they can get according to your scaling.

Well, engy and MP have much, much lower AR. Engy ~2700 with pistol or grenade, mp something terrible with bow probably 2300 or so. Doctors also obviously pretty low. Most other professions are somewhere around 3k in a balanced setup.

I think when you get amazing evades or AAD, your AAO should be compromised.. not the case today.

I know fixers with more AAO than me..and I will exchange my reflects for their 6K+ AAD any day.

More AAO but still lower AR. Also 6k defense (not AAD) would only occur if using all evade perks at once. If you think fixer survivability and offense is so great, I encourage beg you to roll one.

[Mostadio]

Disparity between evade profs/AR profs/and none of the above are extremely out of whack. My engineer runs around with 2500ish AR which means I don't even bother trying to perk half of the profs out there. Even profs that aren't considered "evade profs" are unperkable with this AR. And then there are profs like MP/Doctor who have it much worse. IMO there's just way too much AAD and AAO crap in the game. That stuff needs to be flushed down the toilet.

[erozc]

I guess the point of this thread is, if all the skills provided by IP and / or profession-locked things would be roughly doubled, it would mean there would be no point in making an "evade setup" soldier (like it isn't, actually) or agent, for instance.

I don't still quite understand how this will bring greater variation.

[Xtremtech]

I just re-read the OP and realise I may have misunderstood his intent. I'm not sure that I understand what he means even now... it all depends upon what OP means by "all ratios remains the same".

If the ratios remain the same across all skills, then there shouldn't be any effect at all on hit/miss rates. We know this because it's essentially what happened when SL released and the max skills values near doubled. Whereas before the difference between max green and light blue was 60 points, after SL release the difference was 160... but because this happened across the board and perks/buffs/items maintained the ratios, you didn't suddenly see a huge change in hit/miss rates.

You won't see greater variation. Hit/miss ratios would stay the same. All that would happen is that you'd have greater granularity for managing balance. So, if you had a range of 100 points between maxes for different professions - and then you increase the amounts of skill (but not the ratios) so that you had a range of 200 points.... then the devs can manage balance a little more finely. So before they'd have been able to alter in increments of 1% of the difference - but by increasing total skills they'd be able to alter in increments of 0.5%.

If the OP's thought is that the ratios between high, medium and low values for weapon skills should stay the same... but that the ratio between offence and defence skills should change, in order to give a different hit/miss rate... then simply increasing the values across the board won't help - other than to increase granularity. To get a difference, you need to increase the skills differently for the high/med/low values available in offence and defence - that is the ratios would need to change across offence and defence.

In that case, I'd refer back to my first post and say that changes like that should be done in the hit/miss calculation itself if you want to affect that... and that altering skills values isn't really the way to go.

X

[Gatester]

It is hard for me to explain so I understand it is also hard to understand what my point is.

Let us consider now, that if FC was to rework all player stats as a whole, how would they go about doing that? My enforcer will be a good example because we see complaints about their defense frequently.

Base evades for an enforcer are around 1200 after the abilities trickle. We get evades from symbiants and their trickle for about 1500 total. Nothing in this area can be altered or removed without effecting all professions so 1500 minimum enforcer evades.

Next we look at AAD. Four enforcer specific items have AAD, two ofab items, an albatreum util, and the enforcer dreadloch booster. That is 200 AAD that is enforcer specific so 800-900 is from universally used items. The albatreum item can be replaced by other AAD items, the dreadloch booster can as well. The back armor would be replaced with a notucomm mesh trenchcoat, which leaves the helm that would be replaced with CM or CC.

Removing enforcer specific AAD items only causes a loss of about 50 AAD at the maximum putting enforcers still at 2600-2700 def which many would consider far too much. This is in fact using the minimum items available to many other professions. If FC simply boosts player AR, then they would have problems where all professions begin having too much AR against evaders, and then have to work on evades. It would be a back and forth struggle with trickling.


I believe the root of the problem is that the bulk of player stats is coming from base skill values that are too close in relation to each other. Altering base skill points can be difficult, so the first part would be to either reduce them or increase them proportionally, and I find an increase easier to work with because you would not have to alter the ranges of effectiveness (ie when random rolls for land chance take effect).

What this really does is nothing, but it does make it easier to begin chipping away at profession skill levels. Some items could boost stats the same amount (acrobat, symbiants, AI armor), others that are more profession specific could be increased (self-only buffs, profession speicifc armor) and even the skill values themselves could be altered with a lower/higher gain for strong or weak stats. Rather than 1 to 4 for evades becoming 1 to 8 for enforcers, make it 1 to 5 or 6. Now the difference between an evade profs green skill would be 1 to 10, and an enforcers base stats would become approximately half the value.


This would mostly take effect at level 220 where we do not have issues with skills capping, but I believe once base skills are more properly diverse between professions, we can eliminate the skill cap entirely making players actually run out of IP when they specialize in specific skill areas. The overly effective benefits of items can be better adjusted, and the professions might see uniqueness and IP considerations become the priority. The problem is how indepth and difficult this could become, but if enough of the community was interested in taking these steps then I would be willing to put some effort into doing the math myself.

[Omutb]

Assuming I understand the question, the answer is "it depends".

What does it depend on? It depends on profession.

For some there is more than enough IP "spare" to allow more diverse setups without crippling any particular setup.

For others, they have to spend every last IP in skills that are pretty much "essential" to their survival.

[Xtremtech]

I think I get what you're driving at now.

Your thought is to keep the skills budget - including items/buffs etc - the same as they are now. If you increase the base evades skill available to a profession, then you could reduce the AAD available on cross-profession items while still maintaining the present overall defence levels.

Is that what you're driving at? Increasing the base evade skills (which are profession specific in their maxes due to skills colours) allows you to drop general item/perk buffs while still maintaining evades levels? Your thought is then, that because more of the ovverall skills budget is profession specific... it might be easier to manage and balance difference between specialists and non-specialists.

It would be easier and less risky for FC to avoid changing the skills system. It's one of the oldest (read probably not great documentation) and very deepest game engine elements, that is directly connected to everything else in the game. If you were a dev, changing the skill system is probably the absolutely last thing you'd ever want to mess around with. You'd have to get a really, really good benefit from it to make it worthwhile.

Whether that case could be argued is doubtful, when you could get a similar result by reducing the buffs on general buffing items/perks that affect the skills you want to manipulate and introducing more profession specific items buffing those stats. So, you'd reduce the AAD and AAO/weaponskill buffs available on the various items - such that the overall loss is about equal. Then you'd introduce more powerful profession specific items for those slots as required.

When you take into account the difficulties of messing directly with the skills system - and also the difficulties that would be introduced if you restricted that to certain skills, so that the skills system would end up working differently based on different skills.... I'll bet that FC would prefer to adjust items, which are easy to make and don't mess with deep mechanics.

X

[Gatester]

Actually, nevermind. If you want skill diversity through limitations or skill diversity from increased specific benefits then that is part of some suggestions I will be working on later. Right now, I was more interested in the appearance I think would be the appropriate term. Should it look bigger than it is without being actually bigger? Without more specific or detailed examples it is too hard to explain, and even I am having trouble saying what my intention is.

[Obtena]

As long as there are preferred setups, I don't think it matters what your IP situation is, as least not for PVP. If you have the IP, you will strive for the preffered setup, if that's what your goal is. If you don't have enough IP for that, that's when FC might actually force diversity onto people. More IP will simply dilute a preffered setup with 'goodies' like perception, conceal, etc...

You can answer the question by looking at lowbie PVP where IP limitations are very real. I don't think there is much diversity there though there is the additional factor of having more than one preffered setup for a given prof in some situations.