resistance calculations and some dragon balancing

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 10:44 pm

Well, for the sake of completeness, all monsters should drop body parts. yet some dont, because such as some of the greater demons, demon lords, and balrogs. This is cause they all give super high resistances to dragons. how bout this way to calculate resistances?

Monster is given resistance numbers, and also has a mass. currently body parts just take that resistance number. what if the body parts get their resistance based of the percentace diffrence of mass? so a 5000 kilogram cyclops with 80% resist lightning drops a 50 kilogram hand and a 2500 kilogram body. the hand would only get 8% resist lightning, while the body would have 40% resist to lightning.

the formula might need to have a curve added so that higher resists will give more while lower will give less... might want to curve the other way though so you can level them quickly to 10-20%, then it levels out a bit, then hard to hit 95% again?

might also have to change how dragons get reisists... Leaf had a good point, what if they decay over time, so you must actively eat to keep them up. Ragnor also suggested that as you eat in one area, the other areas decrease. So you have to pick your main FOCUS to level resists in, and while you can eat parts that give resist to more than 2 areas, you can still level up those other areas. probably have to have a combo of this so it stays fair, but dragons seem kinda unbalanced to me. theyre to weak in some areas, and two powerfull in others. some rounding out wouldnt hurt them...

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 3:38 am

what about an approach closer to the way item power is calculated?

let's say that we allow 3 resistance points per player level, not counting resistance in the element to which the dragon is currently aligned.

So a level 1 fire dragon would max out at
95% fire resistance, and a total of 3% in all other resistances.

switching digestion should then half the resistance in the element switched away from. (round down, triv)

if they then switched digestion (to lightning say) at level 15 they could get to
47% fire resist, 95% lightning resist and keep (but not gain) up to 45 % in all others combined (they could not gain resistances, since they would have 47-92 points already)

if they then hit level 40 and switched to acid, they would have
23% fire resist, 47% lightning, (be able to raise acid to 95%) and have up to 120 points total (if they had only these 3 resistances, they could gain 50 resistance points, since they would currently only be using 70)

This would probably mean that dragons should start with a cold or lighting digestion, rather than fire, due to the easy availability of these resists (zombies or ogres)

timbo · Post by **timbo** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 6:41 pm

At lvl 115 would dragons change at all with 345 extra points?

Lets say allowed 95 fire = 345 extra
95 lightning = 255 extra
95 cold = 165 extra
95 magic = 75 extra
75 acid = 0 extra

Reducing 1 stat by 20 points makes that big of a difference?

timbo · Post by **timbo** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 6:42 pm

I guess you wouldnt be able to have poison...but then again my poison is at 30 and my acid is at 10 at lvl 81 and I dont notice a difference.

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 8:20 am

this is a fair point, maybe it should be two points per level?

woo · Post by **woo** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 6:01 pm

Assuming a method similar to this was implemented a dragon would need the ability to "lock" a certain resist to prevent it from goint up or down - otherwise I could have my goal of 95 resist fire, eat an <certain> part and suddenly lose a fire to gain an electricity part.

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 6:14 pm

why would you lose anything?

Simply don't gain resistances.

"Your scales are not mature enough to withstand the resistance effect this food would have given you"

Of course there could be (suitably expensive) potions to /lose/ dragon resistance, this would allow a player who has a lot of acid resistance (say) to free up the resistance points that would occupy, so that a more useful resistance could be gained.

Obviously most dragons wouldn't want to drink such potions most of the time.....

timbo · Post by **timbo** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 6:21 pm

Potions wouldnt really work because I know a lot of the higher monsters give either poison/fire or acid/fire...

If someone was stuck at 94 fire and had 40 poison or acid and had to keep on drinking a potion to reduce from 41 back to 40 to not gain a stat it would take thousands of potions as it is extremely likely to go from 40 to 41 than it is from 94 to 95.

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 8:09 pm

Yeah, so all these 'perfect' dragons will find it somewhat more interesting.

tbh, I really don't see why anyone should pay much heed to the difference between 94% and 95% resistance, other than it being the capping value, the effective difference is small enough to not really matter.

In any event, I was thinking of potions that would reduce resistance by half to a given attack type, not just by 1%, A single potion of that form should be quite enough to reduce a resistance to the point that it has a significantly small effect on resistance points.

timbo · Post by **timbo** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 3:47 pm

Why not make enchant armor scrolls that give +10 to certain resistances or make semi rare scrolls that give +10 to 2 resistances?