As for the "Balance is a lie!" feeling: balance just means good design.
Strongly disagree. "Fun" means good design. "Balance", more often than not, means taking every class, ability, spell, monster, and number in a game and making sure they are on a sameish level, which makes the game boring, therefore the opposite of "fun", and indeed, the opposite of good design.
I've seen it happen way too many times to associate the word "balance" with anything positive from a design perspective at this point.
"Fun" really is a hard topic to debate on since it really depends on the person. I, for one, like roleplay, and I like to powergame with a roleplay basis. For example, I made a topic a couple of monthes ago about a Slayer Playthrough, using the Slayer Form/Mirror Image bug, and though the game was hardly a challenge, I had fun, because the playthrough had its own identity. And then I had fun thinking on how to best use the bug (Inquisitor and Swashbuckler being awesome choices powergaming-wise for this playthrough). But in poison weapon case, it was not the same. I made a Blackguard/ Poison Weapon/ Arrows of detonation, cheating in the Arrows for BG2. I did not even finish the playthrough, because it was so very boring. I tried the same in BG1, ended up with the same disappointment and lack of fun. And even without this interaction, I really felt like using poison weapon, for example, to kill a dragon way before you should be able to was much like talk blocking it while your team attacks it, that is, very dull. Yeah, I had seen nothing quite that powerful, but it was not fun. A bit too much of power may translate into a lot of fun, but poison weapon right now is more than "a bit too much power" and it ended up, in my case on losing the fun. You might find fun, I don't, and neither of us is right or wrong about this. But you and I both are experienced players and we can customize this game as much as we like to make it suit any of our wishes. A beginner, however, cannot, and in that case, something that powerful and unbalanced might ruin his pleasure, and Beamdog has to make the game accessible and likeable for everyone.
Finally, since Beamdog made brilliant new kits with a unique identity (Monk kits and Shadowdancer are more than awesome), I actually trust them with providing more kits with that uniqueness, and if further changes are to be made on the assassin, I believe they really should look at new, unique HLAs, for example.
For those who say that poison weapon makes BG1 too easy, I am wondering how often you rest? For example, if I am about to embark on the mission into the cloak wood mines to take down Daevorn, I know I need to save my poison weapon for him, and might try to rest just before opening the secret door into his lair. I will probably have secured the path to the mines with one or two trips from the FAI, and will try to take the mine up to that last room in a single run, which gives me only a few doses of poison to go around, certainly fewer than the sparingly used spells of my mages and clerics.
If you are prepared to rest and ape on every encounter, then no amount of balancing will help the game.
As I play evil so rarely, I have little experience with poison - I just tried assassin for the first time this year, just before this pending nerf, so I know I am far from the voice of experience. Is there really enough uses of poison weapon available/rest period to trivialize the game without rest-spamming?
For those who say that poison weapon makes BG1 too easy, I am wondering how often you rest? For example, if I am about to embark on the mission into the cloak wood mines to take down Daevorn, I know I need to save my poison weapon for him, and might try to rest just before opening the secret door into his lair. I will probably have secured the path to the mines with one or two trips from the FAI, and will try to take the mine up to that last room in a single run, which gives me only a few doses of poison to go around, certainly fewer than the sparingly used spells of my mages and clerics.
If you are prepared to rest and ape on every encounter, then no amount of balancing will help the game.
As I play evil so rarely, I have little experience with poison - I just tried assassin for the first time this year, just before this pending nerf, so I know I am far from the voice of experience. Is there really enough uses of poison weapon available/rest period to trivialize the game without rest-spamming?
Really, there's little difference between 1/day and 4/day, because like you say, you can rest whenever you need to. That's a flaw with the resting mechanic.
The issue with poison being too powerful is that it can trivialize fights that should have been much more harrowing. Poisoning Davaeorn is a viable first action, but it shouldn't be the only thing you have to do to win the fight.
For those who say that poison weapon makes BG1 too easy, I am wondering how often you rest? For example, if I am about to embark on the mission into the cloak wood mines to take down Daevorn, I know I need to save my poison weapon for him, and might try to rest just before opening the secret door into his lair. I will probably have secured the path to the mines with one or two trips from the FAI, and will try to take the mine up to that last room in a single run, which gives me only a few doses of poison to go around, certainly fewer than the sparingly used spells of my mages and clerics.
If you are prepared to rest and ape on every encounter, then no amount of balancing will help the game.
As I play evil so rarely, I have little experience with poison - I just tried assassin for the first time this year, just before this pending nerf, so I know I am far from the voice of experience. Is there really enough uses of poison weapon available/rest period to trivialize the game without rest-spamming?
Just count it yourself. Let's say you want to go through Cloakwood Mines at once, without resting. There are two significantly tough encounters: the one at the entrance, and Davaeorn. The latter really is trivialized by the current poison weapon, and the first is made quite easy if you do not have the mage/cleric (I cannot remember which is there, or if there is one of each, but one poison weapon use can get two out of the fight anyway) to take care of. And you should be level 5+ and have two uses of Poison Weapon at this point. Even without rest-spamming, poison weapon is the solution to both tough encounters and can be used twice at this point.
Again, I should note that the biggest problem is not about the BG1 behavior, but about the BG2 behavior. An idea that an ability in BG1 (on low levels) should be weaker than in BG2 (on higher levels) can be perfectly protected. The question is more about the change of the behavior for BG2 levels.
Irony is I had just leveled a Assassin to the end of BG1 to prepare for Siege of Dragonspear. I had used poison weapon less then ten times from lvl 1 to 8. Not able to wear helmets until use any item and a thaco just not good enough made the class feel weak compared to an earlier play through of a archer or berserker , or the various mages I have made.
The more times you bring up spiders, the more it sounds like a bug (no pun intended). In vanilla BG and BG2, no poison effects stacked. If they're stacking now, that's new behavior.
I remembered differently so I went and checked. Fresh vanilla BG2 install, straight off of GOG. Rolled a half-orc assassin, dual-wielding the katana and dagger +1 from the storage room. Used poison weapon, and went to town on poor Minsc. I've done numerous tests, both with Minsc failing his saves and him successfully rolling them. All tests indicated poison effects in vanilla BG2 do stack.
So this change does indeed nerf a BG2 high level assassin, even if comparing it to the vanilla BG2 behavior.
Like I said, the change to this particular ability was necessary because of its use in the expansion
Well I dunno. One of those "drows" (Lucille?) in BP1 has used the old poison weapon on us for quite a while now, I don't believe it was ever reported as an issue and we're far below the SoD xp cap.
I mean it can't be a bad thing to have Slow Poison and Antidotes be a decent tactical choice and life-safer outside of BG1, can it?
@Ancalagon44 I totally agree, balance changes should aim to make the game more fun, not simply more balanced. That's why we're looking at the math again.
I say again, this particular change was necessary. There are enemies you'll face in the expansion that use this ability, and that forced us to look at the balance of the ability--not only from the perspective of the user, but also from the perspective of the target.
Removing the stacking is one step toward making it fair. Adding a scaling progression is another. The save penalties are a step toward making it fun. Changing the initial damage from an over-time effect to an instant effect adds dynamic to the ability, which is also designed to make it more fun to use.
That is a poor reason for needing to nerf a player ability though. Just because you give the ability to an enemy, does not mean you need to nerf the player ability.
What most games tend to do in that scenario is create a copy of the player's ability, weaken it, and then assign it to the enemies.
That would be similar to nerfing Dispel Magic for Inquisitors because enemies can use it too. Makes no sense.
You're letting your desire to reuse everything you write get in the way of making a fun game.
EDIT: Why didn't you mention the enemy thing earlier? It is totally relevant to the discussion. You aren't just trying to make one ability balanced for an assassin and a blackguard, you are trying to make one ability balanced for an assassin, blackguard and an unnamed enemy! No wonder you are struggling!
The software engineer in me wants to hate myself for saying this, but just make two extra copies. Give one copy to the Blackguard and one to the enemy. Nerf the one for the enemy as appropriate to make sure the player has fun. Nerf the blackguard one so that the class is balanced. Add progression to the assassin one so that he isn't overpowering at level 1, but keep the stacking which is vanilla behaviour as proved above.
That is getting more into Sword Coast Stratagems territory though. In theory, since Fireball is a very commonly used spell, enemies should also carry Potions of Fire Shielding.
I would go for the minimum possible change to achieve the goal, which is (as far as I understand) Balance the abilities belonging to overpowered kits (since abilities are only overpowered in the context of a kit) Balance the abilities used by enemies so that they are challenging and fun for the player
I've been doing my best not to weigh in too heavily in this debate, because the discussion is interesting and (more importantly) valuable. But some questions have been raised about why we're making this change, so I'm going to respond as briefly as I can:
Is this change being made just to accommodate enemies that use this ability?
No. Enemies using the ability made it clear that something needed to be done, but the Poison Weapon ability is something that we've been looking at for a long time. You can look back to the Shadowdancer's rebalancing discussions prior to 1.2 for discussions on that topic; we've been wanting it to scale with levels for at least that long.
Is this change being made just to accommodate the Blackguard kit?
Again, no. The Blackguard kit obviously offers up some additional power that synergizes with this ability in noticeable ways, but the ability itself was in need of a facelift. The ability has always been too powerful at pre-BGII levels, and even in BGII:EE the fact that it can stack makes it unusually potent.
Why is this change being made to Poison Weapon, and not other powerful abilities?
Poison Weapon is an exceptional case. The damage needs scaling, yes. But in many ways, the fact that it can stack multiple times per round is the bigger problem.
Take @GreenWarlock and his dart-wielding Assassin as an example: over five rounds, at three attacks per round, this one ability has the potential to stack fifteen times and inflict up to 450 damage to a single target. Without even considering the effect that poison has on spellcasters (not being able to cast spells for up to nine rounds), we're already looking at an ability that is more powerful than most 9th-level spells, that can reliably turn a difficult fight into a trivial one.
That's a big red flag, and that's before we start taking into account what you could do with it as a Blackguard. Whirlwind sets your APR to 10, which means that over five rounds, you can stack this ability up to fifty times, yielding a potential damage output of 1500 on a single target, in addition to the effect it has on spellcasting.
I can understand wanting to take a conservative view when it comes to changing classes and their abilities, but Poison Weapon is probably the wildest outlier on Baldur's Gate's power curve.
Okay, you have me 100% convinced that something needs to change because I totally trust you, Dee. Also you're handsome. What happens now?
First of all, thank you.
What we're doing now is looking for a way to make this ability still be useful and powerful, without it being such a monumental earthbreaker. There's three steps involved.
Step 1: Damage Scaling
The first step is to make the damage scale. We needed to do this anyway, since the ability was definitively not designed with levels 1-9 in mind. Finding a power curve that's appropriate for those early levels is important, so that's what we're doing now. (The version of the ability you see in the beta right now is the result of faulty math, so those numbers are going to change. We're also looking at accelerating the progression a bit, so that you'll hit "peak effectiveness" earlier in your development in BGII:EE.)
Step 2: Suck or Suck --> Save or Suck
The second step is to turn that initial burst of damage into an instant effect. This doesn't impact the ability's overall damage output--that initial damage still doesn't allow a saving throw--but it allows spellcasters a bit of a saving (pun intended) grace, in that they're not automatically prevented from casting spells that round unless they take damage from other sources. (This change also allows us to more intuitively scale the initial damage as well as the damage-over-time, which is a good thing as well.)
Step 3: Reduce the degree of OP-ness
The final step is what I think people are understandably concerned about, which is the "targets can only be affected once per round" bit. And I think there's some nuance that people might be missing, so I'll do my best to clarify:
When you hit a target with Poison Weapon, if they make their save, they're "safe" for that round from any subsequent attacks you may make that round. That safety only lasts for one round; on your next round, if you hit them again, they have to make a new saving throw. And so on.
If the target fails their save, they're poisoned. But they're also protected for one round from being further poisoned by your attacks. At the start of the next round, they're no longer protected. This means that you can hit a target once each round and stack poison effects on a round-by-round basis for the full five rounds.
That's still five stacks of poison, which is a lot of extra damage for an ability you get at level 1, and which is probably still overpowered in the context of the game. The difference is that it's no longer subject to the kinds of easy abuses as before. The ability is exactly as potent in the hands of an Assassin as it is in the hands of a Blackguard (which more noticeably impacts the Blackguard than the Assassin).
If we've done our job right, the ability should still be fun to use, and plenty useful. But that's what the beta is for: to give you a chance to try it out and tell us how it feels.
Is this change being made just to accommodate the Blackguard kit?
Again, no. The Blackguard kit obviously offers up some additional power that synergizes with this ability in noticeable ways, but the ability itself was in need of a facelift. The ability has always been too powerful at pre-BGII levels, and even in BGII:EE the fact that it can stack makes it unusually potent.
Take @GreenWarlock and his dart-wielding Assassin as an example: over five rounds, at three attacks per round, this one ability has the potential to stack fifteen times and inflict up to 450 damage to a single target. Without even considering the effect that poison has on spellcasters (not being able to cast spells for up to nine rounds), we're already looking at an ability that is more powerful than most 9th-level spells, that can reliably turn a difficult fight into a trivial one.
................................................... That's a big red flag, and that's before we start taking into account what you could do with it as a Blackguard. Whirlwind sets your APR to 10, which means that over five rounds, you can stack this ability up to fifty times, yielding a potential damage output of 1500 on a single target, in addition to the effect it has on spellcasting.
Look at the first statement I quoted, and then the next two highlighted quotes. Clearly, the Blackguard can do far more damage with this ability than the Assassin can. You said so yourself. In fact, there are many other ways that a Warrior class can boost their APR and thus Poison Weapon damage.
I'm trying to tell you that the context is different and thus the balancing approach needs to be different. But apparently you have already made your mind as to what you are going to do, and so I think you should just close this thread. Everybody posting in it is just wasting their time.
See, this is why I'm trying not to weigh in. I want people to discuss the change, because I know people have opinions about it.
My previous post was to answer the specific questions about why we're making these changes in the first place.
I disagree that there needs to be two (or more) different versions of the Poison Weapon ability, for the same reason that I wouldn't expect to see two different versions of Long Sword. A Blackguard is more powerful with the ability because they have a higher THAC0 and can eventually use Whirlwind. But an Assassin can dual-class to Fighter and get both of those things.
So the only way that an Assassin can equal the damage output of the Blackguard, when using poison weapon, is if he dual classes. Right.
In all other cases, the Blackguard will deal far more damage than the Assassin with poison. More base attacks per round and better THAC0, oh and weapon proficiencies. Nevermind whirlwind attack or weapons which add APR. Or dual wielding.
Long swords are tools which can be used by any warrior class or any rogue class. Poison weapon can be used by two kits and is innate to them. I think its a bit of a silly comparison.
A better one is the backstab ability that both Stalkers and Assassins receive. By your logic, the Stalker should backstab as well as the Assassin can.
No... Backstab is its own mechanic, which is balanced kit-by-kit in the same way that thief skills or THAC0 are. Poison Weapon is, like you say, a specific ability that's used by two kits. It's
There are other ways for the Assassin to boost their APR, which are readily available to both the Assassin and the Blackguard. The Blackguard's access to Whirlwind doesn't negate Poison Weapon's potency when used by the Assassin. We're talking about an ability that can deal 450 damage to a single target in the hands of a bog-standard Assassin wielding a non-magical weapon. The fact that a high-level character can use a High-Level Ability to triple that number is really secondary to the main issue.
I think many of us do understand that the original Poison Weapon is incredibly OP when combined with a high-APR weapon.
Here's a list of things that are currently in the game, have been there since vanilla BG2 (or ToB in some cases), and are arguably even more OP than Poison Weapon: - Time Stop + Shapechange (Mind Flayer) - Mislead + backstab - Cloudkill/Death Fog/Incendiary Cloud + the Staff of the Magi's invisibility effect - Robe of Vecna + Improved Alacrity + any other spell with a 4 second or less casting time
I understand that the difference between Poison Weapon and those tactics is that Poison Weapon is available from the start of vanilla BG2, while those other tactics the player had to work towards, because they became available later on. This much is clear. (Whether or not that's good enough reason to nerf it is another matter entirely, one that I won't go into here.)
The issue from here on out is that the stacking restriction of Poison Weapon nerfs it for everyone. That includes level 1 assassins, level 16 assassins, and level 40 assassins as well. This raises a new question of "fairness". Is it fair that level 40 assassins will have to lose their OP tactic, while mages get to keep all of theirs?
Should mages lose all of their incredibly OP tactics as well?
It's obvious that all of these questions wouldn't be so hard to answer if Baldur's Gate was a more balanced game to begin with. But it isn't. And in my opinion it was never meant to be. Opening this can of worms is not a good idea.
Incidentally, if I remember correctly, one of the new engine features introduced in SoD and 2.0 is that some monsters can be flagged as unkillable by ability score drain. In other words, the Shapechange:Mindflayer trick might no longer work, depending on which creatures are flagged.
I think the idea of creating a super balanced and fair BG is a bad idea. I'd rather play a game that was fun, than one that was "fair".
Beamdog, please rather focus on bug fixing before "balance changes". And may I remind you that this game is not World of Warcraft.
We could balance this fairly well just by applying realism:
1. You can't put more than one dose of poison on a weapon because extra poison would drip off (that's one kind of stacking).
2. Getting hit twice by a poisoned weapon puts more poison in your body and therefore does more damage (that's another kind of stacking).
3. Assassins are better at poison making than Blackguards, so their poisons are stronger.
4. Arrows of Detonation and Fire Seeds don't poison groups of enemies because the fire doesn't break the skin exactly and would burn away the poison (though personally I love this trick).
5. Hitting a Mirror Image with a poisoned weapon doesn't poison the real caster.
6. Stoneskin keeps poison off of your skin as well as out of your bloodstream.
7. Enemies sometimes carry antidotes or memorize Slow/Neutralize Poison.
8. An Assassin's or Blackguard's poison can be negated, and not just reduced, by a saving throw, just like every other poison in the game.
This would make Poison Weapon powerful but would not trivialize some of the toughest fights in the game.
Speaking just for myself, @Dee, my primary concern with this change is actually your "step 2", the no save damage over time. I am 100% on board with the no stacking. That's rather overpowered even for an assassin, who could easily hit 6 APR with darts and improved haste. But the damage is besides the point when discussing the assassin, it's the utility of the poison that makes it useful. The ability to disrupt mages. That #2 change is the big, big thing that really hurts the assassin when using this ability. If the assassin can no longer reliably disrupt mages with their poison, then it (and the class) is really not very useful.
Compare to a regular thief. A regular thief is very poor at DPS, not to mention likely to die in open combat if targeted, but they make up for that with a high single target, single strike damage (backstab) and their almost necessary utility skills. Still, if there was another way to handle those utility skills that didn't have a cost (e.g. knock/detect trap cost spell slots), then I'm willing to bet no one would ever bring a thief. They're too weak in combat to be of any use, even with a x5 backstab.
So now you have the assassin. The assassin has given up their utility skills almost entirely, at least through majority of SoA. In return, they eventually get a slightly higher damage version of the backstab (no advantage before they get it, and they still have to land the hit) and their poison. Take away the poison, and they just have a x2 backstab above regular thieves. Even at x7, though, it's not enough to make up for their open combat uselessness. Without the utility skills, you'd be much better served by taking a warrior class, because the assassin adds nothing else to the party. Giving them ever so slightly more damage does little for their usefulness (20 dmg over 5 rounds, if they can land hits, is next to nothing). What made them useful was that they could disrupt casters. Essentially the whole class, as it plays out in BG2 combats, revolves around tactical attacks with their poison. Without their poison, they're just crappy thieves who can maybe in some cases put out slightly more damage than your standard crappy-in-combat thief.
The blackguard is a wholly different case. On a blackguard, the poison weapon is acceptable as a side ability. You're a warrior first, you have 4 levels of divine spells, and you have a unique and powerful debuff. Adding a nice little stoneskin-bypassing 5 round damage boost is a nice, relatively minor addition.
On an assassin, that same ability is not nearly enough to make up for what the class gives up. If you're going to nerf their primary ability that hard, I hope you consider giving them something else in return. Maybe a faster backstab progression would help (though would likely make them OP in a different way early on, and wouldn't help any late). Maybe another new ability. Maybe give them 20 skill points per level instead of 15 so they can keep some of the thief utility. Just *something* that brings the class back into the realm of usefulness.
Ultimately, I think the reason people, including myself, would rather these abilities be separated is that they hold different levels of importance to the classes. If you removed it entirely from the blackguard it wouldn't hurt the class all that much. They'd still be a powerful warrior with several neat abilities. If you remove it from the assassin, there's nothing left. I just don't see how you can bring two abilities of such vastly different importance levels into a balance that is acceptable to both.
Now that I'm giving this another try in vanilla BG2, it seems like vBG2 Stoneskin protected against Poison Weapon.
Does anyone remember if it also protected against all on-hit effects? If so, why was this changed in the EEs? It doesn't seem like a very sensible change to me.
We could balance this fairly well just by applying realism:
1. You can't put more than one dose of poison on a weapon because extra poison would drip off (that's one kind of stacking).
2. Getting hit twice by a poisoned weapon puts more poison in your body and therefore does more damage (that's another kind of stacking).
3. Assassins are better at poison making than Blackguards, so their poisons are stronger.
4. Arrows of Detonation and Fire Seeds don't poison groups of enemies because the fire doesn't break the skin exactly and would burn away the poison (though personally I love this trick).
5. Hitting a Mirror Image with a poisoned weapon doesn't poison the real caster.
6. Stoneskin keeps poison off of your skin as well as out of your bloodstream.
7. Enemies sometimes carry antidotes or memorize Slow/Neutralize Poison.
8. An Assassin's or Blackguard's poison can be negated, and not just reduced, by a saving throw, just like every other poison in the game.
This would make Poison Weapon powerful but would not trivialize some of the toughest fights in the game.
My 2 cents:
1. I agree.
2. I agree. Also, making poison not stack on targets pretty much ruins the whole point of using this ability with darts or throwing daggers. OR we can make it only partially stack, see below.
3. It's not mandatory but I agree Assassins should be more proficient when it comest poisons.
4. It's hard to achieve. If you apply the detonation via on hit spl instead of using the arrow itself then the detonation would only occour on a successfull hit.
5. Afaik it's not doable, at least not in a flawless way, but I'd love to be wrong for once.
6. If you want to put a protection effect you need a duration on it, while Stoneskin is usually removed before its duration expires.
7. Too bad DavidW isn't around anymore.
8. Within KR I was thinking to split the damage similarly to EE, with on hit dmg (no save) and ongoing dmg (save). @semiticgod may I ask why do you think the save should completely negate it? When I work on spells within SR I always find much harder to balance a save-or-else spell over something with at least a moderate effect even when saved. The former easily go from unappealing (if it doesn't trigger enough) to OP (if it does).
Now that I'm giving this another try in vanilla BG2, it seems like vBG2 Stoneskin protected against Poison Weapon.
Does anyone remember if it also protected against all on-hit effects? If so, why was this changed in the EEs? It doesn't seem like a very sensible change to me.
It was a bug fix that went a little too far in the other direction. The same is true of Mirror Image. I don't promise that either of them will end up being fixed in this update, but they're on the list to be re-examined.
Comments
I, for one, like roleplay, and I like to powergame with a roleplay basis. For example, I made a topic a couple of monthes ago about a Slayer Playthrough, using the Slayer Form/Mirror Image bug, and though the game was hardly a challenge, I had fun, because the playthrough had its own identity. And then I had fun thinking on how to best use the bug (Inquisitor and Swashbuckler being awesome choices powergaming-wise for this playthrough).
But in poison weapon case, it was not the same. I made a Blackguard/ Poison Weapon/ Arrows of detonation, cheating in the Arrows for BG2. I did not even finish the playthrough, because it was so very boring. I tried the same in BG1, ended up with the same disappointment and lack of fun. And even without this interaction, I really felt like using poison weapon, for example, to kill a dragon way before you should be able to was much like talk blocking it while your team attacks it, that is, very dull.
Yeah, I had seen nothing quite that powerful, but it was not fun. A bit too much of power may translate into a lot of fun, but poison weapon right now is more than "a bit too much power" and it ended up, in my case on losing the fun. You might find fun, I don't, and neither of us is right or wrong about this.
But you and I both are experienced players and we can customize this game as much as we like to make it suit any of our wishes. A beginner, however, cannot, and in that case, something that powerful and unbalanced might ruin his pleasure, and Beamdog has to make the game accessible and likeable for everyone.
Finally, since Beamdog made brilliant new kits with a unique identity (Monk kits and Shadowdancer are more than awesome), I actually trust them with providing more kits with that uniqueness, and if further changes are to be made on the assassin, I believe they really should look at new, unique HLAs, for example.
If you are prepared to rest and ape on every encounter, then no amount of balancing will help the game.
As I play evil so rarely, I have little experience with poison - I just tried assassin for the first time this year, just before this pending nerf, so I know I am far from the voice of experience. Is there really enough uses of poison weapon available/rest period to trivialize the game without rest-spamming?
The issue with poison being too powerful is that it can trivialize fights that should have been much more harrowing. Poisoning Davaeorn is a viable first action, but it shouldn't be the only thing you have to do to win the fight.
There are two significantly tough encounters: the one at the entrance, and Davaeorn.
The latter really is trivialized by the current poison weapon, and the first is made quite easy if you do not have the mage/cleric (I cannot remember which is there, or if there is one of each, but one poison weapon use can get two out of the fight anyway) to take care of. And you should be level 5+ and have two uses of Poison Weapon at this point. Even without rest-spamming, poison weapon is the solution to both tough encounters and can be used twice at this point.
So this change does indeed nerf a BG2 high level assassin, even if comparing it to the vanilla BG2 behavior.
I mean it can't be a bad thing to have Slow Poison and Antidotes be a decent tactical choice and life-safer outside of BG1, can it?
Those spiders and wyverns got us prepared well!
What most games tend to do in that scenario is create a copy of the player's ability, weaken it, and then assign it to the enemies.
That would be similar to nerfing Dispel Magic for Inquisitors because enemies can use it too. Makes no sense.
You're letting your desire to reuse everything you write get in the way of making a fun game.
EDIT: Why didn't you mention the enemy thing earlier? It is totally relevant to the discussion. You aren't just trying to make one ability balanced for an assassin and a blackguard, you are trying to make one ability balanced for an assassin, blackguard and an unnamed enemy! No wonder you are struggling!
The software engineer in me wants to hate myself for saying this, but just make two extra copies. Give one copy to the Blackguard and one to the enemy. Nerf the one for the enemy as appropriate to make sure the player has fun. Nerf the blackguard one so that the class is balanced. Add progression to the assassin one so that he isn't overpowering at level 1, but keep the stacking which is vanilla behaviour as proved above.
I would go for the minimum possible change to achieve the goal, which is (as far as I understand)
Balance the abilities belonging to overpowered kits (since abilities are only overpowered in the context of a kit)
Balance the abilities used by enemies so that they are challenging and fun for the player
Is this change being made just to accommodate enemies that use this ability?
No. Enemies using the ability made it clear that something needed to be done, but the Poison Weapon ability is something that we've been looking at for a long time. You can look back to the Shadowdancer's rebalancing discussions prior to 1.2 for discussions on that topic; we've been wanting it to scale with levels for at least that long.Is this change being made just to accommodate the Blackguard kit?
Again, no. The Blackguard kit obviously offers up some additional power that synergizes with this ability in noticeable ways, but the ability itself was in need of a facelift. The ability has always been too powerful at pre-BGII levels, and even in BGII:EE the fact that it can stack makes it unusually potent.Why is this change being made to Poison Weapon, and not other powerful abilities?
Poison Weapon is an exceptional case. The damage needs scaling, yes. But in many ways, the fact that it can stack multiple times per round is the bigger problem.Take @GreenWarlock and his dart-wielding Assassin as an example: over five rounds, at three attacks per round, this one ability has the potential to stack fifteen times and inflict up to 450 damage to a single target. Without even considering the effect that poison has on spellcasters (not being able to cast spells for up to nine rounds), we're already looking at an ability that is more powerful than most 9th-level spells, that can reliably turn a difficult fight into a trivial one.
That's a big red flag, and that's before we start taking into account what you could do with it as a Blackguard. Whirlwind sets your APR to 10, which means that over five rounds, you can stack this ability up to fifty times, yielding a potential damage output of 1500 on a single target, in addition to the effect it has on spellcasting.
I can understand wanting to take a conservative view when it comes to changing classes and their abilities, but Poison Weapon is probably the wildest outlier on Baldur's Gate's power curve.
Okay, you have me 100% convinced that something needs to change because I totally trust you, Dee. Also you're handsome. What happens now?
First of all, thank you.What we're doing now is looking for a way to make this ability still be useful and powerful, without it being such a monumental earthbreaker. There's three steps involved.
Step 1: Damage Scaling
The first step is to make the damage scale. We needed to do this anyway, since the ability was definitively not designed with levels 1-9 in mind. Finding a power curve that's appropriate for those early levels is important, so that's what we're doing now. (The version of the ability you see in the beta right now is the result of faulty math, so those numbers are going to change. We're also looking at accelerating the progression a bit, so that you'll hit "peak effectiveness" earlier in your development in BGII:EE.)Step 2: Suck or Suck --> Save or Suck
The second step is to turn that initial burst of damage into an instant effect. This doesn't impact the ability's overall damage output--that initial damage still doesn't allow a saving throw--but it allows spellcasters a bit of a saving (pun intended) grace, in that they're not automatically prevented from casting spells that round unless they take damage from other sources. (This change also allows us to more intuitively scale the initial damage as well as the damage-over-time, which is a good thing as well.)Step 3: Reduce the degree of OP-ness
The final step is what I think people are understandably concerned about, which is the "targets can only be affected once per round" bit. And I think there's some nuance that people might be missing, so I'll do my best to clarify:When you hit a target with Poison Weapon, if they make their save, they're "safe" for that round from any subsequent attacks you may make that round. That safety only lasts for one round; on your next round, if you hit them again, they have to make a new saving throw. And so on.
If the target fails their save, they're poisoned. But they're also protected for one round from being further poisoned by your attacks. At the start of the next round, they're no longer protected. This means that you can hit a target once each round and stack poison effects on a round-by-round basis for the full five rounds.
That's still five stacks of poison, which is a lot of extra damage for an ability you get at level 1, and which is probably still overpowered in the context of the game. The difference is that it's no longer subject to the kinds of easy abuses as before. The ability is exactly as potent in the hands of an Assassin as it is in the hands of a Blackguard (which more noticeably impacts the Blackguard than the Assassin).
If we've done our job right, the ability should still be fun to use, and plenty useful. But that's what the beta is for: to give you a chance to try it out and tell us how it feels.
I'm trying to tell you that the context is different and thus the balancing approach needs to be different. But apparently you have already made your mind as to what you are going to do, and so I think you should just close this thread. Everybody posting in it is just wasting their time.
My previous post was to answer the specific questions about why we're making these changes in the first place.
I disagree that there needs to be two (or more) different versions of the Poison Weapon ability, for the same reason that I wouldn't expect to see two different versions of Long Sword. A Blackguard is more powerful with the ability because they have a higher THAC0 and can eventually use Whirlwind. But an Assassin can dual-class to Fighter and get both of those things.
In all other cases, the Blackguard will deal far more damage than the Assassin with poison. More base attacks per round and better THAC0, oh and weapon proficiencies. Nevermind whirlwind attack or weapons which add APR. Or dual wielding.
Long swords are tools which can be used by any warrior class or any rogue class. Poison weapon can be used by two kits and is innate to them. I think its a bit of a silly comparison.
A better one is the backstab ability that both Stalkers and Assassins receive. By your logic, the Stalker should backstab as well as the Assassin can.
There are other ways for the Assassin to boost their APR, which are readily available to both the Assassin and the Blackguard. The Blackguard's access to Whirlwind doesn't negate Poison Weapon's potency when used by the Assassin. We're talking about an ability that can deal 450 damage to a single target in the hands of a bog-standard Assassin wielding a non-magical weapon. The fact that a high-level character can use a High-Level Ability to triple that number is really secondary to the main issue.
Why?
Here's a list of things that are currently in the game, have been there since vanilla BG2 (or ToB in some cases), and are arguably even more OP than Poison Weapon:
- Time Stop + Shapechange (Mind Flayer)
- Mislead + backstab
- Cloudkill/Death Fog/Incendiary Cloud + the Staff of the Magi's invisibility effect
- Robe of Vecna + Improved Alacrity + any other spell with a 4 second or less casting time
I understand that the difference between Poison Weapon and those tactics is that Poison Weapon is available from the start of vanilla BG2, while those other tactics the player had to work towards, because they became available later on. This much is clear. (Whether or not that's good enough reason to nerf it is another matter entirely, one that I won't go into here.)
The issue from here on out is that the stacking restriction of Poison Weapon nerfs it for everyone. That includes level 1 assassins, level 16 assassins, and level 40 assassins as well. This raises a new question of "fairness". Is it fair that level 40 assassins will have to lose their OP tactic, while mages get to keep all of theirs?
Should mages lose all of their incredibly OP tactics as well?
It's obvious that all of these questions wouldn't be so hard to answer if Baldur's Gate was a more balanced game to begin with. But it isn't. And in my opinion it was never meant to be. Opening this can of worms is not a good idea.
Incidentally, if I remember correctly, one of the new engine features introduced in SoD and 2.0 is that some monsters can be flagged as unkillable by ability score drain. In other words, the Shapechange:Mindflayer trick might no longer work, depending on which creatures are flagged.
I think the idea of creating a super balanced and fair BG is a bad idea. I'd rather play a game that was fun, than one that was "fair".
Beamdog, please rather focus on bug fixing before "balance changes". And may I remind you that this game is not World of Warcraft.
1. You can't put more than one dose of poison on a weapon because extra poison would drip off (that's one kind of stacking).
2. Getting hit twice by a poisoned weapon puts more poison in your body and therefore does more damage (that's another kind of stacking).
3. Assassins are better at poison making than Blackguards, so their poisons are stronger.
4. Arrows of Detonation and Fire Seeds don't poison groups of enemies because the fire doesn't break the skin exactly and would burn away the poison (though personally I love this trick).
5. Hitting a Mirror Image with a poisoned weapon doesn't poison the real caster.
6. Stoneskin keeps poison off of your skin as well as out of your bloodstream.
7. Enemies sometimes carry antidotes or memorize Slow/Neutralize Poison.
8. An Assassin's or Blackguard's poison can be negated, and not just reduced, by a saving throw, just like every other poison in the game.
This would make Poison Weapon powerful but would not trivialize some of the toughest fights in the game.
Compare to a regular thief. A regular thief is very poor at DPS, not to mention likely to die in open combat if targeted, but they make up for that with a high single target, single strike damage (backstab) and their almost necessary utility skills. Still, if there was another way to handle those utility skills that didn't have a cost (e.g. knock/detect trap cost spell slots), then I'm willing to bet no one would ever bring a thief. They're too weak in combat to be of any use, even with a x5 backstab.
So now you have the assassin. The assassin has given up their utility skills almost entirely, at least through majority of SoA. In return, they eventually get a slightly higher damage version of the backstab (no advantage before they get it, and they still have to land the hit) and their poison. Take away the poison, and they just have a x2 backstab above regular thieves. Even at x7, though, it's not enough to make up for their open combat uselessness. Without the utility skills, you'd be much better served by taking a warrior class, because the assassin adds nothing else to the party. Giving them ever so slightly more damage does little for their usefulness (20 dmg over 5 rounds, if they can land hits, is next to nothing). What made them useful was that they could disrupt casters. Essentially the whole class, as it plays out in BG2 combats, revolves around tactical attacks with their poison. Without their poison, they're just crappy thieves who can maybe in some cases put out slightly more damage than your standard crappy-in-combat thief.
The blackguard is a wholly different case. On a blackguard, the poison weapon is acceptable as a side ability. You're a warrior first, you have 4 levels of divine spells, and you have a unique and powerful debuff. Adding a nice little stoneskin-bypassing 5 round damage boost is a nice, relatively minor addition.
On an assassin, that same ability is not nearly enough to make up for what the class gives up. If you're going to nerf their primary ability that hard, I hope you consider giving them something else in return. Maybe a faster backstab progression would help (though would likely make them OP in a different way early on, and wouldn't help any late). Maybe another new ability. Maybe give them 20 skill points per level instead of 15 so they can keep some of the thief utility. Just *something* that brings the class back into the realm of usefulness.
Ultimately, I think the reason people, including myself, would rather these abilities be separated is that they hold different levels of importance to the classes. If you removed it entirely from the blackguard it wouldn't hurt the class all that much. They'd still be a powerful warrior with several neat abilities. If you remove it from the assassin, there's nothing left. I just don't see how you can bring two abilities of such vastly different importance levels into a balance that is acceptable to both.
Does anyone remember if it also protected against all on-hit effects? If so, why was this changed in the EEs? It doesn't seem like a very sensible change to me.
1. I agree.
2. I agree. Also, making poison not stack on targets pretty much ruins the whole point of using this ability with darts or throwing daggers. OR we can make it only partially stack, see below.
3. It's not mandatory but I agree Assassins should be more proficient when it comest poisons.
4. It's hard to achieve. If you apply the detonation via on hit spl instead of using the arrow itself then the detonation would only occour on a successfull hit.
5. Afaik it's not doable, at least not in a flawless way, but I'd love to be wrong for once.
6. If you want to put a protection effect you need a duration on it, while Stoneskin is usually removed before its duration expires.
7. Too bad DavidW isn't around anymore.
8. Within KR I was thinking to split the damage similarly to EE, with on hit dmg (no save) and ongoing dmg (save).
@semiticgod may I ask why do you think the save should completely negate it? When I work on spells within SR I always find much harder to balance a save-or-else spell over something with at least a moderate effect even when saved. The former easily go from unappealing (if it doesn't trigger enough) to OP (if it does).