So I'm almoost done with the core of it, and I should probably post it if anyone wants to rummage through it, so I'll attach the nonsense below.
The basics are this: Rearrage all the the armor sets into an intuitive 'hierarchy' system to make things immediately clear to the player. There are 7 Tiers (approximately levels ~10, 20, 35, 50, 65, 80, and 100). Armors are broken down into cloth, light, medium and heavy, with normal cloth basically have no requirements, and heavy armor requiring a bit of strength and vitality investment. Heavier armors cost more, provide more defense, and also protect from knockback, but the heaviest also slow the wearer. Specific Items are rebalanced to mean chest and pants are by far the most relevant, and with item costs made proportional. Here are some FuN ChArTs attached lol.
In addition, I got tired of the 'loot finding' part of this game to be more like 'sifting through tons of useless crap'. So to make things clear and intuitive and useful, ALL armors are being added to a set, even the normal ones. So now there's an "Iron Plate" set and "Reinforced Leather" set so the armor you find doesn't feel so random, and normal armors will now have a specific use in that you can likely find/buy a complete set relatively easily/cheaply into a tier before you find a better set of rares or uniques. Armor will be dropped less in general now, and hopefully even normal/white drops will feel significant/possibly useful. The goal is to make everything feel purposeful, visually clear, consistent and intuitive. When I played I had no idea what armor went with what or if any of it was supposed to make sense and quickly learned to ignore whites and yellows unless I wanted to play caravan simulator.
Obviously to go along with this is an attempt to rebalance the stats and the way armor itself works to make your armor actually matter. And that is major annoyance number two: Apparently Graphs used for affixes will ONLY take EFFECT LEVEL as their input... no other stat will be used. Attempting to make a stat like CHARACTER STRENGTH or ARMOR be the StatName, will only multiply this input, by the "effect percent", by the first level of the mastery graph
Which is annoying because a nice smooth curve that gives damage reduction based on armor would be very handy, and instead what I have is just a not-so-elegant linear increase using ARMOR and STATPERCENT in a direct relationship up to 60%DR- ish. I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to make Graphs work with inputs other than the Affix Level, and if not, what you think the best solution would be.
The solutions I can think of are basically creating a skill with many possible affixes with stat watchers to turn them on/off based on the player's armor rating. So for example, in the skill you'd have an affix that is attached between 0 to 500 armor that gives .03% DR per point of armor (giving 15% DR at 500 armor). Above 500 armor that stat watcher flips that off and applies the affix that gives 2.5% DR + .025% DR per point of armor up until 1000 armor(so you still start at 15% DR at 500 armor but increase more slowly after). Above that, stat watcher flips that affix off, and another is turned on that gives 7.5% DR + .02% DR per point of Armor (so you'd still have 27.5% at 1000 armor, but increase more slowly after that). Continue this onward until as high as an armor level you think is necessary, and with enough "switches" to make it as smooth as you want. This can actually get you super close to a good looking curve with only 5 or 6 switches.
The problem with this method is that, ofc, WHY? So much extra work
just to deal with the fact that Graph Overrides will only take level as their input. Also considering it would have to be repeated for each resistance, meaning about 5 damage types * 6 = 30 different affixes that are flipped on/off with stat watchers, and I haven't used them much so I don't how nicely I expect the statwatchers to do what they're supposed to do.
This goes together with moving/assigning the bonus to each stat. The problem of course is that any of the relationships not hard-coded (DEX giving dodge, for example), you cant find a way to make a graph define the relationship, and so if you wanted to make Vitality give DR or Dex give execute chance to attack speed or whatever, you're stuck with the frumpy old linear relationship.
Ideally, it'd be nice to find a way to make a STAT determine an affix level, so you'd only need one affix and the mastery graph, but I haven't yet found a way to make a skill read a stat and make that the affix level. A functional alternative is just scrap all the stats and make them skills with 100 or 500 or whatever levels, each level attaching the same affix with the affix level set to the skills level. These skills would then be "pseudo stats" and I think someone made a program around here that can automate making a skill with a bunch of ranks and just changing the affix level each rank. This would allow it to use a GraphOverride and thus a non-linear graph/relationship between your "pseudo-stats" and their bonuses. Again though, I hate how much extra effort that is for something that would be so easy if there was a way to make GraphOverride and StatName play nicely.
Sorry for wall of text, but I'm interesting in hear your guys' thoughts on the best workarounds for these situation (or if HEAVEN FORBID someone found a way to make the graph override work and Ive been wasting a bunch of time lol)
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Topic: Editing Armor Base Files (Read 4231 times)