>More skills and spells added, additional practices
>lacking. Is it even possible for a Fire giant Ranger to
>practice all of the skills 2-3 times and still max out stats?
>If he's supposed to pick and choose between them (as some
>other online RPGs do), shouldn't they be closer on par balance
>wise? I love that there have been lots of new skills added,
>but it's frustrating to not be able to practice them.
>
>It's roughly as unfair as an elf ranger having a low STR. Elf
>ranger loves that there are lots of new weapons in the game,
>but it's frustrating to not be able to wield many of them.

Let me take it a step further, if I may. I would think a lot of newbies playing don't have the "appropriate" stat high enough when they need it. For example, newbies are the ones regularly leveling up with 17 wisdom and practicing skills with low intelligence. They're probably the ones running around not having practiced all the basic weapons, and maybe not Parry or Dodge. How are they to know what is important and what isn't? After all, if they're playing a melee class (as is often recommended) Sword and Dagger are level 1 along with Parry or Dodge, while Elbow and Knee are higher level. In most RPGs, the higher level the ability, the better and more useful it is. Maybe, following your suggestion on Nepenthe's thread, we should re-evaluate at what level skills become available and move all the flavor skills or those with limited or niche usefulness to level 1 and move the more powerful level 1 skills up in level (at least to level 2 or 3)? Maybe let every class pick what weapon to start with and they get that one at 75% and move all the weapons to level 3?

Maybe it would help to make it easier to roll an "appropriate" stat, like an 18 Wisdom and 17 Intelligence during character creation? That way, we can tell newbies to avoid low int races until they figure out what the skills and spells do.

Like I said, I don't have a good, easy solution to this, but I worry about matching player expectations and it's an area where CF differs from RPGs and MMORPGs providing an additional (and unnecessary) learning curve. I can appreciate and understand wanting to have more skills available than low intelligence races can practice, but in my opinion if this is the intention then the skills need to be more closely balanced power-wise or there needs to be an intuitive way to figure out what is good and what is less useful.

For example, in Guild Wars there are hundreds of skills available but you can only take 8 with you. Sometimes players compete with each other by giving each other a randomly selected pool of skills from which they must make a build and fight each other. And it works. It's fun. The skills are closely enough balanced that it works. Can you imagine doing that in CF? Certain skills in CF are vital and essential to stand a chance and they're haphazardly mixed up among Thrust and Feint. I'm not trying to knock those skills--I like that they're a choice--but there needs to be some kind of distinction between them and Sword and Parry if you plan to keep practices limited among characters running around without enough INT/WIS.


>If anything, INT/WIS/CHR still lag well behind STR/DEX/CON in
>desirability-- people don't really try to maledict them, often
>leave them below max (with gear making up the difference),
>don't gear for them, etc. If you also degraded the utility of
>having more skills at higher levels, they'd be
>nigh-worthless.

To me, this sounds like it could be a separate issue. If these are nigh-worthless, aside from the utility of having more skills at higher levels, then it makes sense that people don't max them out or try to maledict them. But I somewhat disagree with this. The general advantage of INT/WIS to me is not more skills, it's faster learning rates and more "train hp". Gnomes have lots of hps. However, I digress.

Personally, right now I think the harm to CF from newbies improper practicing is greater than the imbalance between STR/DEX/CON and INT/WIS/CHR, but it would be great if there was a solution that didn't impact or even enhanced this disparity.


>valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I appreciate it.

Hutto, the Sleepy Nitpicker