TL;DR: +1 vote for Chantress
Angel wrote:
I'd love to hear the design decision a couple things. First is difficulty. While I cannot comment on anything beyond normal leoric, those units in the past have at least offered mild difficulty. Face tanked them on a pure energy sorc with no es. Killed them faster than a fully twinked level 9 bowazon could in older patches. You mentioned being level 22 (although perhaps younger for your first attempt at Leoric). Andarial is level 25, so you should find a bit more challenge in Cats2. That aside, during the testing phase it was agreed that the changes in HUv1.7 would add extra difficulty, so the early game (especially A1 and A2) should be made easier to compensate. All of Norm isn't especially hard (once you get used to the changes), as was noticed when the public test started in August, but A4 and A5 go by much smoother if you play with a partner.
As for icebolt firebolt, icebolt is just leaps and bounds ahead of firebolt minus the mana cost. Skills have always gone up sequentially, that is if firebolt did 20 damage each level added 15. Icebolt does 150, each level adds 50. The synergies are the same, so the icebolt will be more powerful, or is there the ability to make later levels in the skill add more? Because the weaker starting spells were always balanced around a high synergy modifier to make them viable in the past. FireBolt is balanced to be a standard Single-Target spell (about 60% of MonHP per cast). IceBolt is balanced to be the highest damage spell in HUv1.7 (100% on MonHP per cast). IceBolt costs more than FireBolt (about 50% more), and synergizes with a spell that does no damage (reducing your options when you encounter cold resistant monsters). One reason the difference between those spells is very noticeable is because monster stats change linearly from level 1 (30HP) to level 20 (600HP), so a level 6 spell would start out 6x stronger than a level 1, but might not cost 6x more. The reason the monster stat growth is linear is because it's based on the OpenWounds formula. I later realized that I should have ignored that formula for the early levels because balancing around linear growth for some parts of the game and exponential growth in later parts was an unnecessary challenge (it's not like people care about the first 20 levels anyways, at least not after their first few characters). For HUv1.9 I'd recommend rebalancing level 1 monsters to have more HP (100? I have no Math to justify this yet)
What design decision made you add passives you can't even see? Why be so cryptic about it? It's been mentioned elsewhere (e.g. HUv1.7 feedback/development threads) that a problem was found where players could have enough different buff-states or passive-states on them that they caused other players to Drop from multiplayer games. The solution we implemented reduced the numbers of states available to players. For example, it is very likely that a Barb would buff his party with BCommand, BO, and Shout, so we could just give all the stats to one of those skills and bring players 2 states further from Dropping their party.
In HUv1.7 I've been using the oSkill feature that limits the +Skills to 3 for the skill owner as a means of balancing items. Rather than put 15%PhysRes on some item it could have +10IronSkin (%PhysRes/Lvl). This way I can balance classes a bit by giving some stat to all of them, but less of that stat to the class that already has a lot of it. Another benefit of this idea is that as players gain +AllSkills, they get more benefits from the items with oSkills which helps balancing the changes between Basic, Exceptional, and Elite items. In some cases (ISkin, ElemMasteries) those oSkills are so common on items that it's just a matter of time before your character picks them up, so rather than have items adding 6 more states to your character, I could given everyone 2 states at character creation that give the stats of the 6 oSkills only when you've gained access to those skills. This brought characters another 4 states further from Dropping other players, but has the side-effect of making +AllSkills very important (this mod is very common though, so is a small price to pay). I don't think there's a way to make these 2 char-creation skills visible because they are Passives (unlike "Attack", "Unsummon", "Throw", etc).
For weapon Masteries, it was decided that rather than have 3 states, we could just place the state on every weapon so that a character would never be able to have more than 2 of the 3 states at a time. This brings characters 1 state further from Dropping other players. If you're interested in modding a later version of HU, then I don't mind discussing the implementation details. There's also some information in the "Readme for modding HUv1.7.txt" CoreFile. The states added to weapons were made invisible because making them visible seemed likely to confuse people. Those states do nothing unless you've got points in a weapon mastery.
Lastly I would like you input on design decision of removing qol changes. Enchant duration I can sort of kind of understand since people commonly made alts to chant them. The same could be said for bo.
But why low durations on shapeshifted forms? What does this add? I don't know what durations they had in v1.4 to v1.6, but the current duration was never brought up as an issue. They have pretty standard HUv1.7 durations (relatively long if you've got a point in Lycanthropy). I'm sorry if this displeases some folks used to a different version.
Why, if I chose to, would I play the monotony that is an enchanter in it's current form? Duration aside, having to individually target people is completely garbage. It makes chanting summons impossible. Why was this reverted? I've recently read that after v1.3 Enchant, FArmor, (and HBolt?) were made into AoE buffs (maybe like a Shout or Curse)? I considered that change, but decided against it because it was unfair for a Chantress to not need to target with her spell while most other builds must target a monster for their spell. If Enchant were rebalanced to assume more targets (maybe 4: you, your friend, your two mercs; so 4x mana cost), then the extra mana cost would be a complaint for people playing solo. As a single-target spell, the Chantress has more control over how much mana she spends and when.
One of the benefits of NormRes is that it's easier to target things, while one of the benefits of HighRes is that you can target things further away. I prefer when there are choices for players to make because it makes the game more interesting as you watch players deviate. Their choices aren't necessarily wrong, they're just different.