Doctor Archive

Balancing buffs and combat is certainly a complex issue. I belive I have a thought that might hit a good all around solution to balancing.

One thing that I notice about the current state of combat is how the melee fighters are dominating now with the combination of good armor and buffs. A single melee fighter can really stand toe to toe with about anything and wack away.

I really don't think the melee professions are out of balance with the ranged professions if you don't have a buff, but buffed they are out of balance because the encumberance that armor gives basicly goes away when buffed. Now I know the encumberance doesn't go away but its penalty does. Consider this, the percent of loss of stats when putting on armor unbuffed is fairly high. It really makes it hard to do specials and takes a big chunk out of all stats. But when a person is buffed the percent of the encumb is almost non-existant. This makes the melee fighters take little pain whil fighting.

The way I see it. The way to tone down the effects of the buff without killing the importance of buffs and leveling the playing field between melee and ranged combat is to have the encumberance be a percentage of a person's HAM pool. However, it may be far more important to have it effect not the main ones like health but also hit the strength and const.

In other words the encumb hit should be larger to a person with high hams then someone with low HAMs This will also be good to help people get their armor on while unbuffed but not make the encumb number insignificant to people when fully buffed. Not to mention make a difference between buffed people that wear armor and those that don't.

Anyway I will grab my flame blanket, so fire away.

Hawkeye'
Guardians of Light
Bringing Honor to Online Gaming
www.Guardians-of-Light.com