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Sarissofoi wrote:

Personally I would like to see weaponmaster come back.

Yeah. I thought the new perk (Overwhelm) was going to be the return of Weaponmaster. The trouble currently (especially with fatigue made more of an issue) is that you want to select the right weapons for dealing with each enemy, but you really need the fatigue efficiency that comes from mastery as the game gets on, and that in turn forces you to specialize too narrowly.

Before, when you could be more of a generalist, people wanted more specific perks that would give the feel of the mercenary gradually becoming one with the weapon used. But you don’t always want to use the same weapon, and weapons aren’t so different that skills learned using one would not be at all transferable to others. What tends to happen now, with the more specific perks, doesn’t actually give off the feel of evolving with the weapon used. Instead, you tend to use more accurate, less fatiguing swords and spears until skill and energy levels have been bulked up adequately, and then suddenly switch them over to a more devastating weapon.

While it doesn’t seem authentic for a mercenary to always carry around four different big weapons at the same time (without any additional fatigue cost) and switch between them at will (without any action point cost), it also doesn’t seem authentic that a mercenary would face up to a massive variety of deadly enemies while always relying on just one weapon (with none of the skills developed with that weapon crossing over into the use of other weapons).

Another factor is the availability of high-quality weapons. You might have looted some good-quality standard axes, and so you decide to make your merc with the best melee skill an axe master, but then in the next battle you loot a rare sword that has 40% of damage ignoring armour and a +15% chance to hit the head, and you think “oh shit”.

Although the weapon masteries are weapon-specific, they aren’t very specific to the particular physical skill that’s used. Riposte and Split/Swing are very different skills, for example. In reality, there’s much more crossover between Split/Swing and Round Swing and Shatter than there is between Split/Swing and Riposte.

What I think should happen is that:

— Polearm Mastery should be altered into a mastery of 2-handed weapons (polearms, longaxes, great-swords/axes/hammers and any other 2-handed melee weapons) that reduces the fatigue costs and increases the accuracy/damage of all the relevant attacks (including Split Shield when using any 2-handed weapon that has that skill)
— All the other melee weapon masteries should reduce the fatigue costs of using any 1-handed melee weapon, but should confer accuracy/damage bonuses specific to the weapon chosen
— Throwing Mastery should also reduce the fatigue and action point costs of net-throwing, and (since throwing weapons are 1-handed weapons akin to spears and axes) should reduce the fatigue costs of using any 1-handed melee weapon

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Sarissofoi wrote:

Why not bring back some other ways to recover fatigue?

Old Battle Flow added into Berserk.

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I didn’t know about it until I saw it mentioned somewhere on here.

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In the attached screenshot, “brigands” are listed twice in a row within the text.

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I do miss Battle Flow.

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If the swallow attacks were made non-automatic/95%, maybe they could roll against hit points instead of melee defence – i.e. if the target’s too big, the nachzehrer will choke on it, regurgitate it, and become staggered!

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There are ways of dealing with them – just so long as it’s not Day 2 and you unassumingly take a 1-skull mission as your second contract and (still with a band of six fighters in cloth/leather, without high attack and defence skills and without high durability or weapon efficiency, and armed only with spears and bludgeons) find yourself up against a greater number of nachzehrers, including a ready-made giant one with auto-swallow ability. Under these circumstances, you may already be wounded and may be reluctant to move into melee with 2-3 of the beasts (who will act before you) so as to prevent them from consuming the corpse you just created (assuming you have any action points left after killing it). You may also be reluctant to hold off on dealing a killing blow with your final action points of the turn, since you may already be wounded and/or wavering and/or lacking the energy to form a protective shieldwall and/or concerned that enduring another round of attacks will leave you without enough energy to keep stabbing away at the giant one with your mighty spear-point (still less knock it out with a club). At this point in the game, arrows usually miss (but if they do hit, it’s bound to be an accidental hit against a blocking one that’s already wounded, and which will now provide the nutrition for another of them to attain auto-swallow ability) and spearwalls are exhausting (or at least would be if they didn’t get breached at the first or second attempt).

Once you have a full squad in decent armour with better stats and helpful perks, it all becomes much more manageable. Certainly, by that point, fighting nachzehrers is much more interesting than fighting ghouls in days of olde, but there does seem to be a bit of “imbalance” in how readily you can (sometimes, at random) become swarmed by their parties (sometimes including giant ones) in the very early days when there’s no way you could hope to deal with them.

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Namespace wrote:

Using on anyone with decent talents. It also helps for 11+ so I still see it as being very strong for anyone you will want to keep.

The new description says it becomes inert after level 11.

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Pay 250 crowns to a therapist, and anxiety will heal in 1-2 days (and it’ll never recur and the therapist will go out of business due to a lack of patients brought about by excessive healing skill). If only life were that simple.

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Yeah. The Strong trait also means you can wear armour with up to 10 fatigue without it lowering your initiative or Dodge bonus.

I haven’t yet got to try out the new Nimble, but I think that thieves and gamblers would be ideal for it, since they (especially thieves) tend to start with higher melee and ranged defence skills, as well as higher initiative.

With the old Nimble (I mean the recent old Nimble, not the olde old one that doubled melee defence from all non-shield sources), I managed to get one thief to have typically ~70 defence in battle against both melee and ranged attacks (for the ranged defence, that included the typical bonus from the Anticipation perk). That was from high base defences, high starting initiative (bolstered by 3-star talent so that the Dodge bonuses were +20 even in a mail hauberk – the penalty to initiative and fatigue having been reduced by the Brawny perk), and also the +10% confident morale bonuses (courtesy of a sergeant blowing a trumpet in the first round of battle) and the Lone Wolf bonuses (activated by withdrawing from the pack after attaining confident morale). Bonuses around 10% don’t mean much when a stat is low, but they become significant when it’s already high. In the new game, the Lone Wolf defence bonuses are increased to 15%, and so it might be worth taking for a nimble dodging character who already has high defences and just needs an extra boost to make hits almost impossible. The 15% resolve bonus could help with attaining confident morale now that the Rally the Troops skill no longer raises morale beyond steady (and with avoiding dips in morale due to being surrounded). Gamblers tend to have high resolve as well as high initiative and (sometimes) high defence skills. The only problems with using Lone Wolf to bolster defences now are that (a) the enemy AI tends to be more defensive, so that a Lone Wolf character can’t readily be used to catch archers etc., and (b) the Underdog perk only nullifies 3 of the possible 6 hit bonuses from opponents surrounding a character (although high initiative and the Overwhelm perk could compensate for that).

But, to get Nimble to work, you will need a character to have good base melee defence, because even a +20 Dodge bonus would mean that uber-skilled opponents (e.g. swordmasters) might still have a hit chance close to 75% (and 75% of 75% is still above 50%).

I wouldn’t use the Footwork perk for such a character, because with super-high defences you should usually be able to stroll through the melee at will without getting hit (and without using so much fatigue).

The perks I’d choose for a nimble character would be:

– Definite: Nimble, Dodge, Anticipation, Overwhelm
– Probable: Brawny (if wearing any meaningful amount of armour), Underdog, Pathfinder, Adrenaline (so that they can use Overwhelm against direwolves and necrosavants)
– Possible: Lone Wolf, Fortified Mind (to make it easier to gain the +10% confident morale boosts, and in case of morale checks from being surrounded), Hold Out (in case of one-off hits inflicting injuries that lower defences), Nine Lives (again just in case of one-off hits, and since hit points probably won’t be high on this character), Weapon Mastery (maybe daggers for greater nimbleness, initiative and overwhelming ability), Duellist (if using a one-handed weapon other than a dagger), Reach Advantage (if using a two-handed weapon), Gifted (just to get their defences that little bit higher), or maybe even Taunt (so that they can lure enemies away from vulnerable allies or opponents)

The main attributes I’d increase would be melee defence and ranged defence, and after that I’d go for initiative and resolve. I wouldn’t bother much with attack skills, since their whole purpose is to be hard to hit themselves (and to distract opponents for the benefit of allies with better attack skills). I also wouldn’t bother much with hit points (since they should only get hit once in a blue moon, if effective) but I might use the Hold Out or Nine Lives perks as security. Neither would I bother much with max fatigue, since more max fatigue equals more potential for initiative to plummet.

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RusBear wrote:

1. Training a certain skill (not immediately but + to the maximum roll per level)
2. Temporary trait (strong, healthy, agile) with some chance of +1 to the target statistic after its removal.
3. Special trainig for veterans with permanent injuries in the possibility of some reduction of negative consequences.

I like these ideas.

If you could pay higher amounts of money to have recruits reach higher levels eventually, how would that differ (much) from just paying more money to recruit a sellsword who is already at level 4-5? Would it just be a somewhat cheaper but more delayed way of achieving the same thing for a background that never comes with ready experience? Not that I’d entirely dislike that, since it would make more backgrounds more useable later into the game …

However, I prefer the process of gradually building recruits up, one level at a time, via battles. I’d like it to be quicker, but I still want it to be step-by-step. It’s just a shame there aren’t more enemies later in the game that are suitable for “farming” experience for raw recruits …

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Mike wrote:

Consider me instantly converted to the Church of FA.

+1

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nope100500 wrote:

4. Executioner – never use it. But almost any enemy capable of sustaining a wound, would have one by 33%. So what you propose is actually a nerf.

Actually, I remember having a wildman who was hit on the head by a hedge knight with a two-handed hammer, and it completely destroyed his mailed nasal helm and took 93 of his 98 hit points in one go, but he didn’t get an injury (so I assume there’s a % chance, probably high, of an injury when the threshold is met) …

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Agree about Recover, Head Hunter and (especially) Executioner. I suppose Recover could be useful for a Berserk archer, since you could kill someone with a Quick Shot and then still have 9 action points for Recover.

I believe the calculations for Rally the Troops were already adjusted for the .24 version (i.e. easier to rally fleeing allies, but no longer able to raise anyone’s morale above steady).

I also have found Adrenaline useful on heavily armoured troops. I tend to leave them lurking on the backline as “minders” initially, not using much energy, and then, as soon as an ally gets in severe trouble or a particular enemy seems especially menacing, they can all use the skill to swarm the spot of crisis and avert danger. It almost seems like “cheating” to combine Adrenaline with Overwhelm …

Fast Adaptation would be great with Riposte for someone with super-high melee defence but mediocre melee skill and max fatigue. Also for adrenalized “minder” characters lurking on the backline with maces ready to stun necrosavants or giant nachzehrers. And for archery duels, of course.

Throwing weapons are one-handed weapons, and so, if you combine Throwing Mastery with Duellist, missiles can do nearly as much damage as a crossbow, and without needing to be reloaded. So it’s tempting to try to make use of it for someone with good all-round attack and defence skills/talents, but it’s difficult to make such a build …

You didn’t mention the Taunt perk. Has anyone ever picked that (except me once, long ago, just to see what it was like)? I suppose you could try to use it to draw away enemies in a defensive position who are protecting ranged fighters. Maybe you could even combine it with Lone Wolf …

Now that fatigue is more of an issue (i.e. even missed enemy attacks now impose added fatigue), I think that Shield Expert should also be a “mastery” perk that reduces the fatigue cost of shield skills (especially since front-liners with one-handed weapons will be the ones most affected by the new fatigue mechanisms).

Maybe Polearm Mastery would be more lucrative if Repel and Hook continued to stagger opponents but also became effective against orc warriors!

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Rap wrote:

The party that initiated combat is regarded the attacker, so if you were to click on them first to open the engage dialog, they’d technically be on the defensive and be free to choose whether to charge or hold position.

Then that’ll be what was happening, since I always turn back and fight if trying to escape is too laborious. Could enemy parties not be made to always be offensive in battle if they were going to attack anyway (i.e. if they believed themselves stronger)? There have been so many times when I’ve decided to click back on a pursuing party just to save the bother of a long chase, only to have the even greater bother of a stalemate. And I’ve played the game for obscene thousands of hours while continuing to make such mistakes. I suspect that lots of newer players will do what I did and get frustrated by it.

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