Too Hot or Too Cold, but Where is "Just Right"?

TL;DR = Skip to the numbered questions below and answer them in your post.

A lot of criticism has been levied against the original progenitor build (perturbed koala), and then again with each update (irritated and annoyed koalas). People say "don't nerf! make it harder!" or "it's too extreme, one shots are bad in either direction!" or occasionally "it's not about damage, these attacks are too hard to dodge!" I've made a few threads about things I didn't like about the beta, but I've been holding off on combat because I knew it would change a lot in the future and other people already made threads to discuss it. In other words, I didn't feel like I had that much to add to the conversation.

However, I have noticed some patterns. For example, almost all criticisms are of this form: "X is too high/low, it needs to be lower/higher" There's a problem with that. Where is all the commentary about how low/high it should be? The developers might over-nerf or under-buff if we aren't more specific. Because it seems like there is not enough of this, I'm going to begin this thread with my own opinions, then ask everyone what their opinions are, so that the developers can get some idea were we stand.

First of all, mobs that are below your equipment level should deal no higher than 10% of your health with each attack. I'm not talking about "easy" mobs that are in your same tier, I'm talking about mobs of a LOWER tier. So most (if not all) tier 1 mobs should deal under 10% to you once you've made tier 2 armor. There is some leeway in terms of exact percentage due to the speed of attacks, since extremely slow and easy to evade attacks could do slightly more, and rapid hard to dodge attacks like those used by certain ranged flyers should do less. Why do I choose 10%? Because anything less than that feels like it is only chipping away at you. Instead of checking your health after every hit, you might check every once in a while. Very low-stress.

Second of all, mobs that are above your equipment level should deal no less than 33% of your health with each attack. This does not refer to "hard" mobs in your same tier, it refers to mobs in higher tiers. However, there should be an upper limit of 50% as well. If they are two or more tiers higher, then maybe they should be able to kill you in only one or two shots, but you shouldn't have to deal with being killed so quickly when you are first exploring a new tier and haven't even had the chance to prepare for it. Why do I choose a 33%-50% range? Because that's the point when every attack is dangerous and you need to heal after every hit or at least every other hit. Very high-stress.

Now, you may have noticed that this leaves room for mobs on equal footing with you between 10% and 33%. This doesn't seem like a lot, but it actually is a large range in terms of the number of hits you can take. It's the difference between being killed in nine or ten hits versus being killed in only three or four. That's the difference between an "easy" mob and one that is "hard". At night, mobs you are properly geared for might deal over 25% damage, but during the day time they might take small chunks of 13% off. Underground mobs and enemies in dungeons might be "medium" and deal an about somewhere between that. Note that I'm giving ranges, since variance in mob statistics is very important to keep combat interesting. When every enemy/attack does exactly 12% damage, it make the wide variety of monsters feel skin-deep.

You might be wondering how this would work if difficulty is supposed to increase as you progress in tiers. For that, we need REAL difficulty. Increasing the percentage of damage enemies can take or dish out is FAKE difficulty. Instead of that, the AI needs to improve. The lack of real difficulty in lieu of fake difficulty is why the previous builds of the game have felt a little bit like playing an old NES game-- the phrase "Nintendo Hard" refers to a whole generation of games that were made difficult by inexperienced developers making poor design choices. Admittedly, this is still beta and a lot has yet to be added, but what exactly needs to be added to change this?

For starters, more variety in attacks and behavior would be required to truly increase difficulty, and having more challenging environmental hazards would help as well. Maybe have an acid rain weather type that constantly deals damage to the player when they are on the surface, or a meteor shower that drops damaging projectiles randomly, or earthquake that causes debris to fall from cave ceilings, all of which become more common as the player reaches higher tiers. To have the real difficult progress in a curve as the player goes further means that early monsters need to have very simple AI patterns that are easy to predict and react to, while later ones can have complex and widely varied behaviors that are harder to predict and react to. As-is, mobs on every tier have very similar levels of predictability and variety, which makes the game feel a little too flat in spite of having a great deal of vertical progression.

Bosses should be as strong as monsters of a higher tier in terms of damage output (33%-50% per hit) but should have higher health to prevent players from trying to use raw DPS to win. To encourage players to dodge and heal responsibly without making the battle tedious and fostering the desire to cheese, bosses should only have enough health and defense to survive roughly 3-5 minutes. This has been the norm in 2D action platformer games since the dawn of gaming, and the only certain genres of games deviate from this pattern. The same is true with the 10%/33% rules I mentioned above, since one-hit-kills are almost always reserved for final bosses and enemies in areas that you are extremely unprepared for, except in games that don't even have a health bar.

To finish, I'd just like to mention that this game seems to create too much reliance on gear in general. Even after things get balanced out, will it be possible to defeat the final boss without wearing any armor? If the game is properly based on skill rather than gear, then attacks should be avoidable enough that I can dodge every single attack that any boss uses given enough practice and knowledge. Regular enemies don't have to be so carefully designed, but bosses should reward mastery more than gear strength. It should obviously take many attempts before mastering each boss, but it should be possible. As-is, the only way to do this is by block-cheese or kiting with mobility tech.

So, to reiterate, here are the questions that I'm asking everyone:

1.) How much damage should mobs do if they are one tier below your equipment level?
1.b) And how much damage should you be dealing to mobs one tier lower?

2.) How much damage should mobs do if they are one tier higher than your equipment level?
2.b) And how much damage should you be dealing to mobs one tier higher?

3.) How much damage should easy, medium, and hard mobs deal if they are on-par with your equipment level?
3.b) And how much damage should you be dealing to each of these mobs?

4.) How much damage should bosses be dealing, and how long should a boss battle usually take?

Please answer in terms of percentages or number of hits taken, since it is more helpful from a design perspective.

 

I'm too lazy to put that much thought into it. I just want it like Terraria. It's a good example. You start off with a flimsy wooden sword right? It can kill the day mobs all right I guess. Then you upgrade to an iron sword. The iron sword doesn't start just one shotting every enemy in day and night. It does more damage, but not insane damage.

I can't do percentages as I just don't really know how to be THAT specific. It's really also too hard to say how much damage a boss should be dealing. It's not really something you can just say like "every boss should do 20 percent damage every hit" since there are different style bosses. There could be rapid fire bosses that are quite hard to dodge and do little damage, but constant damage, or there can be really hard hitting bosses that are easier to dodge.

I just think that if you make a new better weapon, it should do a bit more damage. I don't really understand why we need these tiers exactly. It should just be you do more damage to every monster in general. Not just certain tiers of monsters.

TL;DR: I just want it to be like Terraria.

 

Good point. I'd imagine this would be harder to do, though. Almost everything in Terraria was made and had their stats set by hand, whereas in Starbound, weapons are procedurally generated, which makes it much harder to control.

 

I think people are focusing way too much on the stats based part of the battles, and instead we should have a combination of stats based battled with behaviours of monsters...Terraria's combat was boring , monster moves right to left, if there is a obstacle they jump....

With starbound imagine a host of different monsters with different unique attack styles and behaviours...

 

Interesting that you bring that up. Terraria has bosses that do much lower damage per hit (usually ~10%, like regular enemies) but makes the attacks harder to dodge and gives the boss a lot of health and a limited amount of time before the boss leaves. All of the attacks are avoidable until hardmode, though it can be tricky sometimes, but then certain bosses can only be evaded using wings and kiting.

The bosses in Terraria were fairly balanced, though I disliked the health/time limit feature because it made the battle into a DPS race. In hardmode, people frequently complained that the bosses were too difficult before they were nerfed in 1.2 because the attacks did "too much damage", but 10% isn't that bad. The real problem was that the hardmode bosses had nigh unavoidable attacks, creating fake difficulty or an over-reliance on stats.

If you lump certain items together into tiers (wood, copper, iron, silver, gold is tier 1; demonite, crimstone, meteorite is tier 2; jungle stuff and hellstone is tier 3; and so on) then you basically end up with very similar figures to what I suggested in the spoiler in the OP. I actually think that it is harder to manually set these variables because if you know the right formulas you can just set them once and then tweak them a tiny bit and get a balanced outcome.

In most game, balance refers to competitive balance between items that are supposed to be equal, like balancing sniper rifles with shot guns. In Starbound, players have hardly begun to complain about the lack of balance in that regard because the enemy strength is so far from established formulas. In many ways, the stats used are more like those used in an MMO RPG, where linear progression is pushed upon you because skipping one area to enemies you aren't quite geared for with definitely result in being massacred. While a lot of people play those games, I don't think Starbound's intended audience is the MMO RPG crowd, so maybe they should steer closer to the 2D action platformer formulas.

I agree that people are focusing too much on the stats side of things. It's because right now, the imbalanced numbers are the easiest thing to notice. However, since almost two years ago when I first joined the forums, I've always felt that mob behavior and attack patterns were the most important element of combat. I figure the numbers will get balanced eventually, but I'm more anxious about how they'll handle behavior.

Starbound's mob AI still leaves much to be desired. Thankfully it is still beta.
Right now, we only have mobs that charge, mobs that body slam, and mobs that have a projectile.
The only two types of movement are ground and flyer patterns.

Terraria has two unique flyer types (the typical bird/bat, plus the eaters from corruption), a burrowing type, a hopping type, the basic zombie that you described, and hovering mobs that stay above the ground and can climb up straight walls. They also have these jungle vine things, and the turtles that body slam you. It's still not a lot of variety, but it is more than Starbound currently has.

The main thing missing from Terraria is that the mobs can't have multiple attacks or change behavior types. There aren't any mobs that shoot from far away and then melee when you get close, or flying mobs that switch to grounded combat after taking damage. Starbound has the groundwork to support that very easily, so when they get around to fleshing it out more I think it is very promising.

 

Really? I leave for a few hours and I find this on page 28? It's necro time!

I expected a surge in activity during the beta, but more people are complaining than actually playing the game. Not that it's a bad thing, it is the purpose of the beta, but I had hoped that there would be more to say about this. Come on everyone! Where do YOU think the right values should be at for damage, both towards the player and towards the enemies? Let's help the devs get a clearer picture or what the right way to do things is instead of just pointing out the wrong way at every turn!

 

Well, not to be too rude but, too long didn't read :1

 

Thanks for the feedback, check the new TL;DR section at the top?

I'm more interested in seeing other opinions than reactions to my own.