Thursday's Heroes of Steel Alpha Question - Which Talents?

[fallen]

Thanks everyone on the team for your great feedback! So much bug finding, mistake finding, and good suggestions on how to improve the game. You've all made such a difference already.

I am going to start asking some daily, targeted questions so that we can focus on some specific areas. I'd love to hear your answers to the following four.

1. Which are you favorite 3 talents across the whole character set?
2. Which talents are you leveling when you get the opportunity?
3. Which are your least favorite talents or ones you have not tried yet? (Go try them!!!)
4. Any combination of talents or individual talents that you are finding to be unbalanced, over-powered, or under-powered?

[Deleted]

My favourite three talents:
1) 'Myshana's Tears' - so ridiculously useful to heal without having to use health potions. It basically means I can use spirit potions to restore health as well, making it much easier to keep my characters alive during when I'm running low on potions. It was especially useful before I discovered camps! 2) 'Loose' - I like to get rid of the ratkin archers with Tamilin's archery the first turn they appear so they don't bog down my melee-based heroes. 3) 'Crushing Blow' - probably the most useful talent, great for beating up the giant rats and the elite ratkin (I can't remember the name of them).

I level up those three talents the most, but I've also started to upgrade Tamilin's 'precision pick' and 'disarming touch' to make sure I don't miss anything.

I don't use 'slash' as I'm focusing Tamilin on archery and it's therefore underpowered. Neither do I use Karjtan's 'strike' as I usually have him behind Kyera and Vraes as a backup for spells and magic attacks. Other talents I don't use much are 'farsight'(as I don't think the spirit lost is equal to what I gain from revealing a small area - I may as well scout it out), 'savage sweep' (as I've already upgraded 'crushing blow' and it seems very similar) and 'ethereal anguish' (as I prefer to use up Kyera's spirit with 'myshana's tears' and 'choking ash' is a better alternative anyway. I haven't tried 'pureflame shield' much yet.

I don't really see the point of farsight, as I can guess pretty well which direction monsters are coming from and I just use commons sense and memory to navigate. Maybe it could reveal a larger area?

[evmaker]

Oct 24, 2013 10:11:51 GMT -5 fallen said:

Thanks everyone on the team for your great feedback! So much bug finding, mistake finding, and good suggestions on how to improve the game. You've all made such a difference already.

I am going to start asking some daily, targeted questions so that we can focus on some specific areas. I'd love to hear your answers to the following four.

1. Which are you favorite 3 talents across the whole character set?

I will admit that I haven't been back to camp more then a few times after leveling for the first time (exploring the entire dungeon hunting vermin, and testing different difficulties), so I have not been able to try out alot of the locked talents.

That said, Farsight, Myshana's Tears, and Phalanx Shield, they are fairly straitforward but they work well.

I have been staring at the 16 spirit regeneration talent on the cleric however and fully intend to test how that works out.

2. Which talents are you leveling when you get the opportunity?

With the above caveat, usually so far I'd plan to focus more on making the outlander tougher (tank style talents), stealth focused ones for the thief, healing for the cleric and pure damage for the wizard.

The idea of using the thief as a stealth scout sneaking into an enemy camp, robbing them and finding out their numbers before the rest of the team arrives and have them ambush before the real battle starts sounds fun to me (my butchering of a description that was talked about once during the kickstarter)

4. Any combination of talents or individual talents that you are finding to be unbalanced, over-powered, or under-powered?

At the same time that I do enjoy and think farsight is a great ability, at the same time I kind of feel the spirit cost of using it regularly is prohibitive.

It's kind of gotten to the point where I will just scout with the thief and risk being detected (further improvement on stealth probably will help here), rather then using farsight, since it feels like my spirit potions are better used to keep my team able to use their other abilities (wizard charring some vermin in the morning, cleric healing, etc..) then to keep the thief being able to cast farsight as much as I do like the talent.

That's just how I personally feel/two cents on that though.

[fallen]

Awesome responses! Please keep it coming team, this is invaluable player data! You'll definitely see balancing coming into the game based on this type of feedback (already looking at Farsight SP cost).

[hosh]

Oct 24, 2013 11:35:11 GMT -5 @jr8825 said:

I don't really see the point of farsight, as I can guess pretty well which direction monsters are coming from and I just use commons sense and memory to navigate. Maybe it could reveal a larger area?

You are not playing Nightmare :-D The thief is way too weak to be caught out in the open.

I am not able to use farsight as much as I'd like. I didn't know levelling up farsight means the SP cost is higher. For some reason I thought it would have *reduced* the cost, which would have allowed me to cast it more. I had not seen any SP reduction benefits from skills yet. Her other talents are too useful, so I ended up having to forgo aimed shot most of the time, and using the outlander as point man. Farsight would be a lot more useful if I could reduce SP, or at least, be able to indicate traps.

I have not played with Blacknight yet, but I am considering using it for scouting. I generally find range advantage for archery way more fun than backstab, so it would be neat to use Blacknight to circle the thief to a sniping position from the flanks or rear ... except, I don't think unit facing matters. I think I'd feel more comfortable using the thief to scout alone rather than using Blacknight if I had a way for her to escape the horde when she finds them -- either through increased AP (or maybe, decreased AP for movement), or something like a smoke bomb or a similar talent to distract the horde and let me get her away.

The Chocking Ashes + the outlander's extra damage is a pretty good combo. I think I need to bump up the area effect to make better use of it.

[hosh]

Oct 24, 2013 11:54:01 GMT -5 evmaker said:

It's kind of gotten to the point where I will just scout with the thief and risk being detected (further improvement on stealth probably will help here), rather then using farsight, since it feels like my spirit potions are better used to keep my team able to use their other abilities (wizard charring some vermin in the morning, cleric healing, etc..) then to keep the thief being able to cast farsight as much as I do like the talent.

Stealth-scouting is what I will end up having to do with my thief. I think I will need to bump her stealth much higher before that is effective. I'd rather not have her be caught out in the open.

[Deleted]

Oct 24, 2013 12:46:27 GMT -5 hosh said:

You are not playing Nightmare :-D The thief is way too weak to be caught out in the open.

I am not able to use farsight as much as I'd like. I didn't know levelling up farsight means the SP cost is higher. For some reason I thought it would have *reduced* the cost, which would have allowed me to cast it more. I had not seen any SP reduction benefits from skills yet. Her other talents are too useful, so I ended up having to forgo aimed shot most of the time, and using the outlander as point man. Farsight would be a lot more useful if I could reduce SP, or at least, be able to indicate traps.

Point taken, but I personally tend to keep her near my rear (protected by the outlander). I just feel her other talents are much more useful - I need more incentive to use farsight and suck up her SP.

I was also surprised at first to see SP increase when I upgraded talents, but I suppose it can be partly countered by upgrading attributes to have more SP overall or by upgrading the cleric's talent to replenish SP.

[evmaker]

Oct 24, 2013 12:46:27 GMT -5 hosh said:

I didn't know levelling up farsight means the SP cost is higher. For some reason I thought it would have *reduced* the cost, which would have allowed me to cast it more. I had not seen any SP reduction benefits from skills yet. Her other talents are too useful, so I ended up having to forgo aimed shot most of the time, and using the outlander as point man. Farsight would be a lot more useful if I could reduce SP

I was kind of surprised at first about it too, not so much for damaging abilities like increasing the wizards fireball, thief/outlanders damage abilities, but things like farsight I was.

On one hand I was thinking maybe "Utility" abilities, like farsight, picking locks, etc.. might have a gradually decreasing SP cost as they level up rather then increasing. But on the other hand, as you level your going to be increasing your spirit, either naturally by leveling or increasing it with stats (to offset that talents SP costs are always increasing), and so reducing the cost of those abilities would make it so theres no reason not to 'spam' them (like detect traps so you can avoid hitting all the corridors filled with pointy death)

But that still leaves the problem for me at least with farsight and increasing costs, even with increased spirit to compensate for the increasing SP costs on abilites and as much as I like the ability and find it very good to use, it's still doesn't feel worth the SP costs to use it regularly (although I know Andrew's said it's costs are being looked at)

Edit: Also, I'm not near a camp currently to double-check, but I'm pretty sure that somewhere in the skills they had a note that increasing that skill would reduce the SP costs of the talents related to that skill.

[Lesleyr]

Definitely 'Myshana's Tears' in number one spot. It is still undecided between crushing blow, loose and farsight. The latter I don't like to cast as I'm stuck in that perpetual combat problem already reported so don't want to waste SP.

[Rivvin]

Seems like Myshana's Tears wins the day! ^^
I also like Loose and I would like to use Security more often...

[johndramey]

My top three talents are definitely:

1) Myshana's Tears
2) Aimed Shot
3) Choking Ash / Ethereal Anguish

My least used talents are

1) Farsight
2) Pureflame Shield
3) Blacknight

Now, I'm not saying those talents are useless, because they're not. I just think they are more situational and I tend to only use them rarely.

I'm going to bring up one small thing, and everyone can feel free to disagree with me, but I think that Myshana's Tears is a little too good at the moment. The SP cost is relatively low and the healing amount is relatively high. When playing (on normal, mind you) there was never really a situation where I couldn't keep my characters at max health due to the amount of healing that was available every turn. What are people's thoughts on upping the SP cost or dropping the instant heal amount? In my mind, Myshana's Tears should be more of a utility spell for outside of combat, not something that can be done during combat. Lowering the amount of it's heal or (ideally) adding some kind of cooldown would go a long way in making it less powerful but still useful.

Also, what's the distinction between Savage Sweep and Crushing Blow? It seems Savage Sweep is more about accuracy and Crushing Blow is more about damage, but I think there could be a little bit more distinction between the two skills.

[slayernz]

Myshana's Tears is definitely the #1 talent - especially because your blocking skills seem to be REALLY crap to begin with, and even ants might be strong enough to take HP away from you. Actually, that was one of the things I noticed first up when I started playing. I thought "My goodness, all of the party has huge HP and MP!" I'm used to games giving you like 10 or 20 HP, and half that for MP. Your initial combats (especially those only giving 1XP) are against things that may take 1HP off you if they actually manage to hit you.

It seems HoS has gone a little the other way because you NEED the amounts of HP that you have - ratkin, spiders, and pretty much everything else regularly takes away 10 - 20 HP, not to mention the frickin spike pits taking away 50HP per step!

Farsight should cost way less in SP - maybe as little as 1 or 2 SP. That way, you'd be inclined to use it more.
Disarming Touch is pretty useless (at least at the level I am playing) because you have to constantly check lots of floor tiles (no, I haven't managed to figure out what pixel is slightly out of place to indicate a trap). Passive detection of traps (allowing you to use Disarming Touch to disarm) makes sense ...

Every time I select Karjtan, my brain automatically says "you've selected Raistlin". Dunno why that is ..
I use the Firebolt 1 spell with Raistlin, but only because he's got nothing else even remotely offensive apart from that toothpick he calls a staff.

For the outlander, it would be awesome to have a spell that buffed a weapon for x number of turns rather than just buffing for a single action.

[evmaker]

Oct 24, 2013 16:55:28 GMT -5 johndramey said:

I'm going to bring up one small thing, and everyone can feel free to disagree with me, but I think that Myshana's Tears is a little too good at the moment. The SP cost is relatively low and the healing amount is relatively high. When playing (on normal, mind you) there was never really a situation where I couldn't keep my characters at max health due to the amount of healing that was available every turn. What are people's thoughts on upping the SP cost or dropping the instant heal amount? In my mind, Myshana's Tears should be more of a utility spell for outside of combat, not something that can be done during combat. Lowering the amount of it's heal or (ideally) adding some kind of cooldown would go a long way in making it less powerful but still useful.

For me I'd have to partially disagree on this one. I think the cleric has two possible roles they can play as, mainly a melee combatant with some spells to back them up, or a dedicated caster/healer, but either way the in-combat healing ability I see as one of the defining characteristics of the class.

And adding one rank of the ability doubles the spirit cost (and heal itself), so as it levels up it will get more and more costly to use.

And since the only two current that we know of ways to regain spirit (with the exception of the clerics spirit spell) are potions a potentially limited resource or trudging back to/finding a new place to rest which may be few and far between I feel that part balances out.

Now the partial part is I can see the heal part as possibly being too strong, but how to balance making sure it heals enough that it matters without making it be situational if you want to use it with its increasing spirit cost (you could just get unlucky and have no monsters in view and get the 'can you hear that' and before you can do anything have a deathkin and 3 other vermin doing over a 100+ damage before you can do anything as I've had a couple times).

Edit: Reading slayernz's post reminded me (still at work so unfortunately cannot test) that you do regularly take decent amounts of damage, a couple ratkin warriors, or a single deathkinif a deathkin can do over a 70 heal of damage in a round.

Also once you are at the end of your 'spirit pool', it takes a number of potions to get it back up, especially if the lowest ones at beginning levels (let alone when spirit pools are higher and spirit costs of higher level heal is higher)

[hosh]

Oct 24, 2013 13:07:44 GMT -5 evmaker said:

Edit: Also, I'm not near a camp currently to double-check, but I'm pretty sure that somewhere in the skills they had a note that increasing that skill would reduce the SP costs of the talents related to that skill.

There was a note. It didn't happen on the first skill increase.

[hosh]

Oct 24, 2013 12:57:37 GMT -5 @jr8825 said:

I was also surprised at first to see SP increase when I upgraded talents, but I suppose it can be partly countered by upgrading attributes to have more SP overall or by upgrading the cleric's talent to replenish SP.

The rise in attributes to increase SP does not rise exponentially. It increases linearly. So there is an offset, but at some point, it won't be worth it for long.