class vs class imbalance (Hide in plain site / Knockdown)

flyinghtcher

I'm not sure If this has been brought up, but player vs player had some inherent balance issues. Now D&D is about co-op and I'm under no illusions that designing it to be PVP is not going to take high importance. I still feel that it should be discussed as it can be a very fun aspect of multiplayer.

One of the issues that gave huge problems was Hide in plain site, as it left anyone with a good pool of skill points and access to non cross class skills to abuse Hide and move silently. Leaving players the absolute need to have true site. This nerfed the rouges tactics making them a useless option. As variety and choice is king this was a bad option. I did see some very heavy lag inducing heartbeat scripts that tried to prevent or slow down repetitive HIPS attacks that crippled Multiplayer servers.

Our own solution was to remove all "True sight" from items, and to only give "see invisible" on casting the "true sight" spell unless the player in question had heavily invested in both Spot and listen skills. This had a side effect of making Druids with dragon form very valuable when combating rogues.

A much preferred solution would have been to limit the frequency a rouge could hide. As a rogue equipped with a bow and HIPS was near impossible to target and attack in the same time that they could spam the sneak button.

There are a lot of things players can focus on to get past the rock paper scissors style game that D&D is in PVP, and attempt to make a rule everything top trumps character. Though the only two that really caused issues was Knockdown, and HIPS. As they were too inaccessible to deal with.

Thoughts appreciated peeps ?

sippelmc

Its not just a PVP issue but also a PVE one as well, as I often found it very difficult to manage creating balanced PVE encounters as anyone with HIPS can basically make most encounters meaningless unless the NPC is given true seeing, which then is unfair to other PVE builds trying the same encounter.

The solution is to softcode it / sneak and have it hooked to execute a script or something.

flyinghtcher

Hah, very true, I'm guessing the lack off vocal butt hurt NPC's made me forget that.

highv_priest

AI can actually be programmed to ignore HiPS as they can maintain locks with no issue at all. I feel like stealth in general should have a customizable cooldown though. Corner Sneaking monks were just as bad and can be even worse (cs can bug true seeing)

Rifkin

I suggested adding more visibility layers for nwscript. If this was implemented alongside more events and dynamic event binding (only need to bind an HIPS spam stopper to people with the feat.) then we could effectively soft block this, and not kill our servers doing it.

FreshLemonBun

Some old ppl say that party killing was a big thing back in the first few decades. As a matter of fact 3rd edition especially was designed for PVP by virtue of everything sharing the same progression rules, monsters could even take class levels.

I haven't played a HiPS rogue in some time but I thought many servers already put cooldowns on it. With darkness and cutscene invisibility I think there sort of are layers too, but not really enough, I agree it would make things easier especially pinpoint selecting who can see someone.

badstrref

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Terrorble

I just caught wind of NWN: EE and its scope, and immediately thought about what I'd like to see done better. Topping that list: HiPS. Glad I'm not alone. A customizable cooldown would be perfect. I also struggled with HiPS spam while building for years on a mixed PvE/PvP server. It was a point of much frustration.

FrozenDervish

Easiest way to fix HiPS would be to have the spot/listen checks happen immediately instead of after the stealth has lasted an entire round. The second would be to lower the possible skill points allowed into stealth and move silently so that the rolls for it matter.

Dreadlord_Anwyn

You could do two AI solutions with tagbased scripts manglings. Like the AI_Flee behavior if end combat round happens because the person just vanished. Also, if the NPC is a mage or can otherwise AOE, you can alter your basic OnCombatEnd or whatever that event is so they either flee or randomly throw about AOE damage. I seem to have a vague memory that there is stuff like that already, or was in any case. Like, have OnPerceived set a local int if the character has HIPS. an OnCombatEnd or whatever the event is called you can splice in the AI_FLEE behavior/call an include file of you own that makes them cast their AOE. You could probably just have certain "smart" critters do the latter by setting a variable on them related to what spell they will lob out randomly that the OnCombatEnd calls from the custom include. Because it would be a randomly place AOE, the player might get hit, or might not.

As for players, if you have to fight a HIPS guy, bring grenades or be a spellcaster?

Its kind of a stupid implementation that taking damage doesnt force a penalized steath check. But at least these ways, the mob isnt just standing there, doing ambient animations looking like a der de der who cant remember he was just fighting some guy.