In the early days of the original God Wars mud, several players complained rather heatedly that the "crab" fighting style was overpowered.

They calmed down after I explained to them that it didn't actually do anything, because I hadn't yet implemented any bonuses for it.

I just had to note, that to me 'classic' means 20 levels, and no such thing as a "remort", or a hero class. Those came later. :)

I don't think equipment has been considered here because in many games, equipment is NOT the source of your power. In my DikuMUD, the top weapon in the game does 3d6+4 damage, while an average weapon a high level player could afford does 3d6 or 2d8+1. Your stats or skills make up the vast majority of your damage output. Armor is similar, in that the difference between a full set of average high level gear is about the same AC as a very rare set, but the difference lies in how often you'll need to repair it, and how many times it can be repaired.

When I think classic, I don't really think of Remorts either. Remorts actually kind of break immersion to me. I gain all this skill as a warrior, and then poof, suddenly I'm something else? Just doesn't work for me.

For equipment, I see it as an equally important, but separate, balance issue. If you have unbalanced skills, I don't think you're going to balance them by adding equipment. If you have a balanced skill system, and a balanced equipment system, then you can start looking at a balanced combined system, but not before. Balancing equipment almost deserves it's own thread, though. And having skills come directly from equipment would be an interesting way of having eve style swappable classes on one character (e.g. a naked character does almost nothing, but if he puts on the stealth suit and wields a lockpick, he's a thief, and if he puts on his robe and wizard hat he's a wizard).

As for inivisibility, I see it as a defensive skill, so I would try to balance it against other defenses. It wouldn't bother me if there were an assassin type character who strikes really hard from invisibilty, but it would bug me if there was a character who was invisible, but impossible to kill even if you revealed him.

Regarding testing, I don't think using AI to test balance will work, unless you either use a heuristic for estimating power based on skills/equipment (almost certainly going to be wrong, but might be useful for identifying *weak* builds), or your MUD combat system can be completely played by an AI. Most combat systems don't really work for this, though.

Well, you're assuming that the skill and equipment systems are orthogonal systems. One could quite easily imagine skill sets that allow or prohibit equipment sets. (In fact, this is done all the time; just think of mages who can't wear armor.)

In some sense, equipment is not all that different from skills, other than you can more quickly swap out equipment. (Except in games where skills themselves are fluid – or in your example where skills come from equipment.) But picking this piece of armor over that piece of armor has a similar effect of having to pick one or the other.

I suppose that's true. You could (possibly) balance a powerful spell by stopping the user from wearing armor at all, for example. If you're doing that, your equipment design and skill design will probably need to be tightly coupled.

I've played open ended games where spells were less effective when wearing armor. And more so the further away from cloth you got. It was still viable, but greatly hindered, in higher tiers of armor. Even if it's not systematic, you may have a way of stating gear that doesn't allow high armor values and a high magic values on equipment at the same time. So I think it's not even a black or white issue.

Heh we all have those who tell you how it works while you are the one with the code under your eyes….
Anyway, I am not even sure balance is a goal to achieve. Does a mage has to be able to win in a one room fight against a warrior ? Should he not be using his brain instead ? Does a necro should be able to resist anything without his minions ? Should a thief should be able to stand against a dkn ? Or a cleric deal more damage than a paladin… balancing imho should no go to far. I tried to make so no class has an edge over all of them. I prefer the stone paper scissor game.

"Balance" is a goal to achieve, although that is not the same thing as saying that every class/build/whatever should be able to engage in a fair one vs. one fight against every other character. I'm not sure why people assume that "balance" automatically means that everybody is equal against everybody else, rather than having many different combinations that are equally fun to play.

If the MUD has a 1v1 PvP focus, then yes, I think that any player should be able to beat another player 1v1 most of the time if that player is more skilled (with level held constant), and class shouldn't impede this. That doesn't mean that all classes should act the same (priests having equal damage to paladins, etc.). Just that every class is given options to defeat the other classes, and it's the use of those options that determine the victor. In practice, this will be a difficult thing to accomplish, I think.

If the mud is focused on grouping, then I support the idea of multiple roles, and focus should be on making each role fun so that there's enough of a distribution (if you require a healer in every party, make sure to make healing as fun as killing things).

If it's not a PvP MUD, I don't think it matters very much. The focus should be on "Is X class as fun as Y class", with power being a means to having fun, but not the end.

If you're using a skill based system, replace class with build.

I'm going to make a stronger statement here: I think it's basically impossible, if you want true diversity of roles to the tune of damage-dealing paladins and health-restoring priests. Ultimately the fighter deals in giving and receiving damage, whereas the priest only heals it. How then would such a fight go on? The healer won't be able to hurt the fighter; the healer can keep healing himself for some amount of time; and where does the fight go? This sounds like either an exceedingly boring fight that never ends, or one that is doomed to have the priest eventually lose. :wink:

Perhaps I'm just seeing this through too narrow of a lens… do you have examples of how a priest/warrior fight would proceed, while maintaining true diversity of roles?

You are correct that a focus on 1v1 PvP makes for a very different game than a focus on XvX PvP, as does for that matter PvP vs. PvE and so forth.

Repentance: Every point of damage you heal on yourself is dealt to the originator of the damage.

Simple mechanic to make a priest more viable in single combat while not really changing their dynamic in a multiway fight.

The trivial answer is that you can't, but the problem part is "diversity of roles". The warrior can't be the only one who gets damage abilities, and the priest can't be the only one who can heals. Once you break that, you can start making the matchup worthwhile. The priest uses the "smite" skill to do a little more damage then that warrior can deflect with his "ignore damage" ability, while trying to be healthy as long as possible with his superior healing skills. The warrior relies on stunning blows to disrupt the priest's healing, counting on the fact that he's doing enough damage that more then 3 hits in between heals will be enough to end the fight. Both have a ton of other skills that influence the course of the match, and might even change each other's goals.

Note that the warrior MUST have a deflect damage skill, or some form of passive healing, or potions, or something, since otherwise as a soloist he eventually bleeds to death from tiny 1 damage cuts. Likewise, the priest must be able to cause damage, or he has no way of killing anything ever.

Actually I think that completely changes the multi-way fight dynamic… it basically turns the priest into an area-of-effect attacker, based on who attacks him. Also I'm not sure it really helps single-opponent combat: in fact, it seems that it could easily make the priest overpowered, or just whittle down the warrior without actually finishing him.


Well, once you break that, it becomes very difficult to actually have distinctions between classes/builds/etc. It essentially boils down to variations of the same thing. Are you 60% damage 40% healing or 40% damage 60% healing?


Well, sort of. Yes, if he's dying by 1000 cuts, but not throwing in any cuts of his own, that's a problem. But presumably, the warrior is doing more damage than those 1000 tiny cuts are.
And clearly, the priest must be able to do damage. But this brings us back to square 1 again: how can you keep things interestingly different in terms of defined roles, while not having variations of the same thing?

Perhaps this comes down to whether or not you want diverse roles, and based on one's answer to that, you decide if it's possible/meaningful to have 1v1 fighting in the game.

Well, I happen to play a few MMOs and I exclusively play healer. Generally in PVE content at the highest end healers typically are expected to never take damage what-so-ever. In a lot of games in high end PVE content a nontanked strike could be instadeath, in fact. So I'm not sure it changes the dynamic at all. The balance around abilities like that can be changed. Like 1/3th the healing converted to damage, etc. If you're setting up the argument that the only way it's acceptable is healers to deal zero damage, well, that's dumb.

Also, the more split up the damage dealt from healing the priest is the less effective it would be. If you have 5 people smashing a priest (first of all the priest will probably die) but second of all it won't be enough damage for the priest to be effective at all in a multiway fight. If you have 100 damage per second coming in and the priest can only heal 100 hps, but it's split between 5 targets. That's dealing 20 damage per second to each of them. If one of those 5 targets could heal the rest of the party the priest wouldn't be effective at all. It's typically, also, easier to heal in well balanced games multiple targets than single targets.


For what its worth, I PVP competitively on world of warcraft on a priest as well. They're given a shield ability with a cooldown period. Some builds allow reflection of damage taken at like 40%. It's powerful, it's effective, but it's not overpowered. Healers don't dominate.

Oh, and additionally, such a mechanic would be almost certainly under the affect of healing prevention in PVP. The more multiway the action is the more the healer would be stunned, the less the mechanic would even work. Or mortal strike effects preventing the healing.

Frankly, it's useless talking about the dynamics on paper since the other factors are almost endless. It's equally useless to talk about what sounds unbalanced, too. My point was you can design healers with mechanics that give them the properties of a damage dealer under certain circumstances without making them an effective damage dealer in general.

Well then in that case the skill is useless. :wink:


No… I was responding to the one-for-one equation that you described.


Well, yeah. I was just saying that it doesn't seem like this mechanic on its own is a game-changer: it must be paired with a lot of other things.


It's hard to contextualize a statement like this without knowing what the overarching design goals are. Are we trying to optimize for 1v1, 1vMany, Many-Many, PvE, etc..

Healers have buttloads of damage mitigation. It's a pretty consistent set across several MMOs. Their damage style is also fairly consistent.
I'm not gonna spell it out for you, go do the homework yourself if you care. I'll just give you the overall effect: Healers are tough to kill due to mitigation in several generic forms, and generally will beat most DPS-oriented classes over time with steady, low damage in pvp. Healer vs. Healer fights are renown for the stupid amounts of time they take in pretty much any game for this reason. In groups, they're packing the heals and supplementing damage. There's a few ways to empower or diminish the healer role, up to eliminating it completely. I wanna see a mud with health kit drops! MUSH! Er… sorry.

Personally, I was hoping WoW would have actual D&D style clerics when I finally got around to playing it. But, no. You got a bunch of cartoony non-denominational dress wearers with crazy shit hanging off their shoulders. Disappoint, I most surely am.

Ssol, are you not basically saying that either healers generally win, or are incredibly boring to play? It seems that either way, that's not a situation we'd like to have. :wink:

So how many sheets did you take before those words appeared where they weren't before?

Oh, sorry, this must be the point where you revert to your usual posting style. My bad – I should have known better. :smile: