Yeah, I thought about the difficulty slider some more, and the third effect I was missing is a penalty to non-combat skills, like in classical Fallouts. If I also exclude Merchant, it will by definition cover all aspects of the game besides combat and money, which is what I want.Eksekk wrote:No, please don't penalize xp/skill point gains, it will make it much harder to achieve relevant masteries.
Actually, I've decided it will be switchable anytime (possibly except in the middle of combat). The settings screen has this "turn rate" switch that hardly anyone ever uses because anything but "smooth" is too fast on modern PCs, so I can seamlessly replace it with a "normal/hard/very hard" difficulty chooser. The ability to change it midgame imposes some restrictions on what a difficulty level can affect, however. See next paragraph:Eksekk wrote: And like you said, it should be optional, so someone wanting to play doesn't hit the wall and stop playing. Maybe allow difficulty to be switchable ingame until you leave Emerald Island?
I am definitely not going to increase monster spawns. One, it's not easily reversible, and as I mentioned above, I want reversible changes. Two, more monsters means more loot, which would make gold penalty meaningless. Three, despite what you propose, AOE spells do not need a buff! They're already very useful and very powerful, at least in my experience. I actually spend most of my mana on these.Eksekk wrote:In my opinion, boosting monster stats (possibly spawn rate of monsters to make group nukes like meteor shower/fireball/rock blast more useful, but don't overdo it, because then incinerate and more single-target damaging spells will be useless; ideally, some monsters should have spawn rate increased and there also should be (mini)bosses where you can utilize all debuffs and single-target damaging spells) and increasing buy prices should be enough.
What I ended up on: at higher difficulty levels, monsters will act more quickly (lowered recovery) and receive less damage. These two changes are functionally equivalent to increasing attack (including spells) damage and HP, but are perfectly reversible and don't affect visible stats, making switching difficulty more smooth.
Good idea! As long as the bonus is modest enough, it makes sense. I know I myself find it hard to rationalize playing at higher difficulties unless there's some advantage to it. I will also have to remove Learning from penalized skills to avoid contradicting myself, but that's fine.Eksekk wrote:And in my opinion you should be somewhat rewarded for playing on a higher difficulty mode, so maybe a little more XP for killing enemies like numerous mods have done? Not enough to completely trivialize the game, but enough to feel a difference in power?
Actually, I sort of addressed this spell already. In classic MM7 and MM8 Armageddon suffered from a bug that made its damage irresistible, even by monsters resistant or immune to Dark. I fixed this in v1.0, and also changed the spell's element to Magic as part of the elemental system redesign, and since an average monster in my mod is more resistant to Magic than ditto in vanilla to Dark, Armageddon is not quite as effective as it used to be, or even as it could be. And in v2.0, it's penalized further by imposing a massive reputation penalty whenever you cast it (which is also sort of a vanilla bug fix). Positive reputation is very hard to accumulate, so to me at least it's an effective deterrent. The only area where reputation doesn't exist is Eeofol, and since dragons and titans are fairly resistant to magic, it doesn't do much good there anyway.Eksekk wrote:Also, armageddon should be nerfed, it's the one spell that is OP because you can kill anything on the map from safety of your hideout. But please don't go the way of bumping magic resistance of every monster outside, it's better to just disable the spell entirely or make it so ridiculously expensive that you'll be able to afford it only with GM merchant and selling literally everything you find. Another option is backporting MM8's Dark Grasp instead of armageddon, but it depends on your willingness, it would still be powerful by wrecking bosses, but not powerful in a "you'll empty all maps in half an hour" sort of way.
Really no idea how can people ever run out of reagents; if you clear most outdoor maps, you should have enough to last for the entire game. And besides, shops to mass-buy reagents already exist, they're called "alchemy shops in the three Town Portal cities which restock every time you visit a training hall". In fact, all alchemy shops restock exceptionally quickly.Eksekk wrote:Well, the only difference that you said is a veeeery important one, as Protection from Magic is possibly one of best spells ingame, and having no way to block the mana-drain is a problem. Of course, there's alchemy, but normal blue potions are too weak (unless you grind alchemy to 15+, but then you'll have no magic skills, and find clanker's amulet and savescum +25 alchemy item from dragons), and white divine power requires too many reagents to be easily solvable. Maybe add another type of shop where you will be able to mass-buy low-level reagents, of course for boosted price? It would make alchemy a viable counter to this problem.
Actually, I see the problem here. The thing is, some special attacks are just unfairly hard to protect against in vanilla MM6-8, and mana drain is one of them. Basically, some attacks are affected by elemental resistances, and some, by primary stats, and the latter ones are much, much harder to avoid due to how primary stats are handled. I've amended this in v1.0, and now the odds (NB: odds, not chance) of resisting such attacks are increased fourfold. I believe if you play my mod, you may find that SP drain is no longer as annoying as in vanilla.Eksekk wrote:Still, I can't force you to nerf the mana-drain, but it is annoying having to constantly reload and/or lloyd back to church (I'm mainly considering the final devil room in colony zod there, as advanced form of wights mana-drain is manageable because you don't encounter them in bulk). And yes, you can use weapons, but spellcasters have very low hp and will die easily in hand-to-hand combat, so it's not a complete remedy.
If not, try collecting harpy feathers in Deyja. You can get a +15 or so alchemy item fairly easily, +12 more can be obtained from hiring companions, so a 30 effective skill is easy to get, which equals 50 mana per feather, which is enough for the midgame wraiths and vampires. And for the endgame devil fight, use the elven toadstools. It's just one area after all!
Alternatively, there are Soul Stealing weapons in v2.0, which could be the perfect counter for the lack-of-SP problem: if you can cast, you cast; if you can't, you stab someone and (hopefully) recover mana. Although, admittedly, they're very rare.