Benedict wrote:
The VERY limited number of skill points really screws up rogues as well. They need to be good in light armour, a weapon, hide in shadows, move silently, pick locks, skullduggery, survival, divination so that they can get cats eyes, find hidden so that they can spot the traps (and a rogue build is probably going to have a low perception so they need a few points in the skill to even equal a mage who's just pumped it as their primary attribute). Plus any generic skills like lore or cartography. By contrast a mage can just pump elemental magic and meditation (and if they just pump those and save their skill points from character creation to use up at level 2 they can be throwing around level 6 firebolts with the maximum mana regeneration rate) and everything else is a bonus.
It's a tricky one, the tendency to go for a skill based system with initial choice of class being a minimal effect makes it difficult to give different classes different skill point allocations, but when you've got a rogue who needs to be quite good a few different things it makes them seriously weak. Maybe balance the start differently, e.g. give rogues and warriors several starting skills against only one for mages or healers but make it very expensive to pick up divination or elemental magic as a secondary skill.
Rogues also need some kind of bonuses to sight and combat in the dark, maybe on the grounds that they're more used to being in the dark. And fighters need some kind of special attack modes.
I have to agree on the rogue skill crunch. I like how the class plays, frail during the day, deadly by night. Carefully sneaking through dungeons clinging to the shadows on the look out for traps (and loot
), picking where and when to fight is all alot of fun, but you get spread terribly thin trying to pull it off. I'm only level 4 or 5 so far, and I'm doing ok, but that's with a lot of after the fact metaing of skills and some save and reload cheese with chests. (I might have been able get by without that if I had read the forums more thouroughly to begin with and better optomised my starting skills, and held out for an absurdly good stat roll... But that all does seem like a bit much. Perhaps when they get around to improving the manual it'll help some.)
I'm wondering if maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to combine some of the skills though (It would screw up the 8 stats / 24 skills symmetry, but I'm not sure what else you could do about the problem without changing the starting skill sets for the classes.), like: Hide and Move Silently into Stealth (or whatever name you like) or Pick Locks and Skullduggery into... I'm not really sure what kind of a name you'd give it (perhaps just keep Skullduggery ?) but they do seem to fit together well enough thematiclly as they're both subverting delicate mechanical devices. Rolling a reduction of the darkness to hit penalty into the spot skill could provide a non-magical means for a rogue to improve their night fighting skills as well.
I've also seen several people suggest switching Short Blades to Dex and Speed which seems like a good idea as well. Maybe add parrying daggers as a "shield" (if that's possible with the engine, maybe for book II ?
)keyed to the Short Blade skill with less armour than normal shields (shield armour ratings would probably have to be bumped up to make room, but they seem fairly low anyway for requiring their own skill and all the hassles that come with using them) but with a small damage bonus (~+1 for most, maybe +2 for the best ones) ?
Anyway, those are just some thoughts I've had about the rogue balance issue, overall I really enjoy the game, it seems to have a nice bit of an Ultima feel to it.
-Agleth
