Assuming Rika's numbers were near accurate, I think that current scale is fine without the few weird increases and reductions if it wasn't brought on my racial resistance.

The argument being made is right at or over that 20 mark of strength. There simply isn't much reason to use a warrior race with the insanely high strength because of how worthless it becomes. It simply wasn't worth the balance and other penalties associated with it. It was much more beneficial to choose aslaran, let's say, and speed up your attacks at around 15 strength (and even more for demis which was about the problem). So you had combinations of people getting near the maximum useful strength, sped up, and stats placed elsewhere and not wasted in worthless strength.

Since warrior races don't have strengths 20 or over, I assume you mean that some warriors can get over 20 with various stat buffs and they allegedly aren't finding it worth the trouble. With the weighted buff modifiers, I thought it was pretty rare to get over 20. We can consider increasing the impact of stats over 20, but I'd like someone to give a run down of which races can get buffed over 20, by how much, and what they do to get it. (Remember, this would include magic users getting over 20 intelligence as well.)

I have a question. I am a faeling with trans alchemy, do I now get a level 4 sip bonus or is it capped like regens?

Philosopher stone is not capped by racial sip bonus (stacks on top).

Yay

STR
Values are TRUE (non-weighted)
Titan +1
Demigod/Ascendant +2

Values are weighted
Atheletics strength +3 (All knights have)
Lich nighttime +2 (Necromancy only)
Lich daytime -1 (Necromancy only)
Highmagic geburah +1 (All knights can have)
Totems bear +1 (communes only)
Truefavours +1
Herofetes +1 (all can get, cheap to do)
Astrology blessings +1 to +3

As you can see, non-titan/demi/asc igasho and taedaes can easily achieve 20+ strength from both cities and communes.

As a demi, I have 20+ strength with any race that has 15 or more racial str (i.e. merian lord, brood viscanti, elfen lord, dwarf, krokani, taedae, igasho, orclach, human) despite the nerf to demi stats down to only +2.

That said, most of the higher str races simply are not worth it because of atrocious dexterity and horrid balance. Also, I disagree that int and str should be thought of indentically- so long as differences such as karma knowledge giving +2 int (war only boosts damage, not adding str), and int races having 18 base int with eq bonuses (aka imperial merians) it will never be a comparable situation.

INT
Edit: Imperial Merians have 18 base intelligence. A demigod Imperial Merian (20 base intelligence). This becomes 22 intelligence with knowledge karma blessing (easy to get). It is actually possible although difficult/unlikely to achieve 25 intelligence.

20 base +2 weight (knowledge) +2 weight (minor knowledge domoth) +1 weight (hero fete) +1 weight (truefavor) + 3 weight (dolphin sphere) +3 weight (chaos minor domoth), etc. At +9 or higher, you get +5 to the actual stat (this example gives +12 so all of them aren’t necessary) giving 25 intelligence (cap).

Edit2: On a personal note, my return to Lusternia was rather disappointing. I'm all for combat dynamics and complexity, but it has gotten to the point I think where all you really need to do to achieve victory is spamming afflictions/hindering. Fighting outside of groups simply isn't a wise decision. In fact, the ability for one person to use superior tactics and finesse is simply obsolete at this time. Perhaps that is my skewed perception and frustration, but I doubt it.

Ok, boss lady, pull up a chair.

First, STR 20 is considered the cap against which nearly all warriors find themselves pushing. As Rika has ably demonstrated, STR benefits level off sharply at this level, making it nearly useless to increase STR beyond it. All warriors with tri-trans have a +3 STR buff in Flex, and almost all can gain at least one additional point in STR for a guaranteed +3 total to STR. Let's go through the different races that benefit less from high STR, based on the following groups:

SUPER HIGH STR (16 or better)
Tae'dae (18)
Igasho (17)
Krokani (16)
Brood Viscanti (16)
Merian Lord (16)
Taurian (15, but has racial +2 STR buff)

These races will all be brushing up against the STR cap once their simplest buffs are activated. In the case of Tae'dae, they will be beyond the cap at STR 21. The problem with these races is that Demigod is useless in terms of buffing their damage abilities: the extra +2 or +3 STR no longer matters to them. For Igasho and Tae'dae, who already have very bad balance disadvantages, making STR useless in this manner is a total deal breaker.

HIGH STR (14-15)
Orclach (15)
Dwarf (15)
Lvl 85 Human (15)
Elfen Lord (15)
Dracnari (14)
Loboshigaru (14)

Do permit the indulgence of my next demonstration. As a nearly omni-Trans Ur'Guard with Highmagic, I can stack archlich (+2), flex (+3), and geburah (+1) as a level 92 human to get STR 19. Given a truefavour and herofete, I can hit the STR cap, even before hitting Demigod. As a result, nearly all the warrior races hit the STR cap before hitting Demigod. Consequently making traditional high STR warrior races poor considerations for Demigod. Instead, people choose to stay a little bit under the STR cap and invest in races that will grant balance advantages, or better dexterity for wounding.

EDIT: I should say, relatively poor choices for Demigod. Yes, each race has advantages and disadvantages when selected. But isn't the whole point of high level combat picking a race most suited to combat? How much can people afford to have races with useless STR points, often at cost of substantial disadvantages?

Since I read some comments from yesterday about tweaking the statpoint bonus curves, I thought I'd throw some ideas out. It seems that the problem isn't where the maximum value is, but rather how steep the weighting curve is. I think that the peak being somewhere around 12-14 is fine, but perhaps tapering off the bonus so harshly might help.

I'm not sure how the weighting code actually works, but I always thought it was something like a logarithmic scale, being a good approximation of linear at the lower numbers but then tapering off as you got higher and higher. However, it doesn't quite seem to be that way from the numbers that I've been seeing. If I'm wrong, though please correct me. I think that a great way to fix the statpoint issues would be to use something closer to a logarithmic system along the lines of

output (for damage, wounds, whatever) ~ scalar*(logbase (n) of (STAT)) + baseAmount

mostly because I feel that a log curve is fairly easy to understand, could be VERY easily tweaked (scalar and logbase), and most importantly represents to me the way the stat weighting system should be like. Thus, the biggest increase per statpoint would be from 0 - 1, but there wouldn't be much of a noticable dropoff until you start getting near the first "scale" (equal to n). As such, the biggest differences will be noticed by the 13-18 statpoint ranges. Extremes would still be kept in check by the plateauing nature of a log curve, and people would still get their (almost) linear increases until the curving starts in earnest. For people who aren't sure what I'm talking about, I highly reccomend fiddling with some graphing software like Excel, and using equations in the form above (not sure if excel can do logs in other than base 10, but I remember that there's some rule that lets you divide logsomething by log something to get log something else and it was all very elegant but I'm not a math major, never use such things, and as such have forgotten them until I go home and get my math binder).

Anyways, it's way too early in the morning, but if this sounds cool contact me somehow and I can elucidate.

(Side note, DMP appears to be based off a log system if I'm not mistaken)

I would smack your nose with a newspaper if I could Tervic. Math? BAD TERVIC! BAD!

I did it for you, as I was equally ashamed of myself.

Right, as a demigod, I see no reason to use a race with over 15 strength if it comes with lots of disadvantages, as my basic defences would put me at 20 strength. What would an extra strength get me? 4 damage and 7 wounds on my morningstar. 8 damage and 3 wounds on my flails. On greatrobes, I'd imagine this to be even less significant, and then there is fullplate. This was without armour too, so it is so insignificant that I'd much rather go for other stats or better advantages/disadvantages. I suggest that there shouldn't be such a large drop from 21+ strength, but rather, the weighting is the same as 12-20.

This is why I think igasho and tae'dae (And quite possibly some others) make such useless warriors offensively. They have slower balance. Their strength is so high that the extra points get destroyed by 21+ weighting. They have very low dexterity, which means while they can build slightly more wounds, they cannot manage any of the higher ones with as much ease.

And that's exactly why I've been crying out for Tae'Dae buffs for a long time. I'm not saying they can't tank things well... I'm saying that they have no viability in PvP whatsoever.

I think looking at stats from 12 - 20 and saying its 45% better is a bad way of looking at things.

I would suggest the following.

STR/INT +% damage
12 +4%
13 +4%
14 +4%
15 +5%
16 +5%
17 +5%
18 +6%
19 +6%
20 +6%
21 +7%
22 +7%
22+ +1%

*cheers on the tae'dae/high str activists*

I don't see how we're looking at the curve is bad as you're basically taking what we now have and extending the curve to 22. That was one of my questions, should we extend the impact of the curve past 20, if so to what? Your example curves from 12-22 at ~60%. Don't worry about the exact percents per level, I'm curious about the core question of whether we should extend the range. (I was frankly considering curving 12-25 to 60%.)

From the responses, it appears that most warriors, regardless of race, can get over 20. Is that true? If so, then is everyone getting a 60% damage bonus really what we want?

Same would be true for intelligence--it appears almost all imperial merians would be able to get a 60% damage bonus (i.e., raising their int to 22). Is this where we want to go? Maybe it is!

For my own curiosity, if the figure still exists, what was the old formula like? There used to be a clear-cut advantage for having 18+ strength or int, now it is cut down quite a bit.

Eh. I'm sitting at 15 with Demigod and a Truefavour. Should hit 16 with a herofete. Then again, Shadowlords do have 10 base strength... so any race with 14 base strength or higher could hit 20 with Demigod, Truefavour, and Herofete. That's pretty much every single warrior except Aslaran and Faeling, so they don't really get any benefit for the upper ranges.

Still, stats were weighted specifically because of the obscene numbers some people are pulling with runes. Obscene numbers are still possible, and I'm not really sure that making them even worse is a good idea. See: Sojiro's old flails before he spec-changed.

Obscene damage with magic-sourced items is also still something that can happen with the right artifacts / setup, so... again, I'm not sure that's really what you want.

Any time you have a Hard/Soft cap on a stat then you will see races that trade off low base stats for other advantages become more powerful than high stat races. This will only compound over time as more things get added to the game that can boost stats. Each time you add a new buff from a skill or item you continue to add to the problem. Demigods with their old unweighted bonus really draws attention to the issue but it is more general than that.

Will rapture easily support removing the hard cap on stats? Honestly I think things would be so much easier to balance around if every single +1 in a stat gave the exact same bonus as the prior +1 and stats could go as high as you could force them. This would allow a real tradeoff between starting with higher base stats or starting with lower stats but having other non-stat advantages.

If this can not be done then I at least suggest having things scale up to 25 and then taking another look at stat weightings so you can ensure that the only way to get to 25 is if you picked the race with the highest base stat in that area (and not all stats have to be able to get to 25 of course).

Another method, but probably far out of the scope of this review, would be to take the WoW/D&D (yeah yeah I know) approach and place each buff in its own category and make buffs from the same category not stack. I think this is already partly done with food (right? a herofete and a dex kabob do not stack?) but you could expand this and make it explicit. This would be easier to balance around than pure weightings for future skills.

As it stands the softcap of 20ish is too low with the number of buffs in the game.

We can do whatever we want with Rapture! I'm fine with scaling more up to 25, I'm just not sure if we should or if we do, by how much.



Sure that's possible, but I really don't think there's any reason with the weighted buffs (i.e., you can only get from +1 to +5 based on how many weighted buffs you manage to accumulate). If anything, we can more simply change the weighting if there's an issue with players getting the extreme +5 buff.

In my opinion, our weighted system makes more sense and is much more easy to balance than artifically assigning a "level" or "category" of buff to every skill that gives you one.