Sorry, been a busy week for me, only now found time to reply. Wouldn't consider myself an "expert", but good enough to give an opinion or two So yes, you can count me in. The combat definitely needs some improvement, fully agree. The main problem I see is: The progression after approx. halfway is not balanced well. At a certain point (I think around the time you get lvl4 equipment), combat becomes way too tedious. The numbers just don't scale up "right". If you spend your gold wisely, you can be almost immune to damage pretty much right out of the door. This takes away some aspects from the game, but is a different story I won't go into now. You can go 100+ combat turns without taking any damage. Until suddenly that one extremely improbable roll comes up and outright kills you in one shot (happend to me at least twice, not making this up). Now, at some point the monster armor catches up to be on the same "invincible" level the player enjoys. The game turns from pretty good into a rather tedious slugfest, where both the player and the monster stand there and trade blows for 10+ rounds (or even more) without doing any damage. And whoever hits the low probability of an attack that does damage first, usually wins the fight. This tediousness is the main - and I dare to say only - reason I did not complete Arcance Quest 2, and Arcane Adventures. Of course, I realize that rebalancing this system will require a lot of work on other areas as well (e.g. healing availability and mechanics). But that you see the problem is already a great start Also, some other things I'd improve: - Show all items in the Store right from the start. Currently, higher level items will only show at a later point in time. - Make stats more transparent. Include an online handbook that tells up front what the maximum level is, which character gets which boni on level up, etc. - Make it easier to swap characters in and out of the party. I have come to really dislike mechanics that force me to level up another character from scratch if I want to try him. Instead, I suggest to use an overall "party level", and character levels get derived from that. - Make buy and sell prices for equipment identical. I know, lower sell prices are a staple of the genre, but they still are a bad design decision from an enjoyment-focused point of view: Ultimately, they boil down to "more grind for grind's sake" , which is never good. - If you can pick where your statpoints etc. go: Allow to respec for free (almost) anytime you want. Maybe not in the middle of a dungeon, but surely when you are in town.
I agree to some of your points, while I think others don't need much rework. Part of any RPG is also finding the right build/team and sometimes it may require a few restarts. Obviously, if the game is boring, than restarting could be a pain. If the game flows in the correct way, it should be a pleasure. With regards to the combat system, I fully agree with you, that's exactly what I'm looking to change. I'm also introducing characters stats (STR, DEX, INT etc.) that the user can customize, just to make things even more complex So finding a right combat system, that can also consider char stats, won't be an easy task. I already have a few ideas, but I'd rather talk in private rather than in the public forums. Thanks
