I've never been into barehanded combat in games that include weapons, but I think it could add something interesting to this game.
I envision it as something like this:
You can toggle to barehanded, just like switching from weapons and charms.
Your base damage with barehanded attacks depends on your level. Every level increases the flat damage by a small amount.
Barehanded attacks gain significant damage multiplier from strength, and crit chance from dexterity.
Weapon damage & EE have no effect on barehanded attacks, but other stats do apply (attributes, life steal, etc).
Pros:
---Adding new interesting mechanics to the game, which should always be welcomed!
---Adding diversity to player builds
---Adding value to weapon drops with melee-oriented stats, but no EE, which would be really great for the economy, and great for newer players
---Adding some flexibility for newer players trying to build gear sets as they unlock new classes
Cons:
---This would likely be very difficult to balance, requiring a lot of ongoing testing and tweaking for a long time, which seems really difficult for current development to keep up with
---This would be bad for glyphers, who would find that some items that were only good for glyphing, and therefore cheap to buy, glyph, and sell for profit, would now be very valuable for barehanded builds, and not worth glyphing
More on Balancing
(tl;dr on balancing: I know it would be hard to balance, but when you'r voting, just imagine a great system of balance was developed, and base your vote on that!)
I won't pretend to be able to come up with the right numbers here, but these are a few of the balancing issues that come to mind, just because it's fun to brain storm on it. Don't take any of these numbers are necessary parts of my suggestion when deciding how to vote.
Also, to a significant degree, deciding how to balance this would need a firm idea of what the intent is. Gearing for barehand combat would be very different than weapons or charms, because you won't need that all-important single item with high EE. Because of this, you will probably end up with a either a highly gear-dependent build that is pretty much useless without the amazing gear, or a generally well rounded build with a potential to get way OP. Finding a decent balance between these is would require floors, and caps, and diminishing returns, and blah blah blah. Lots of balancing.
It would probably be necessary to allow only certain classes to use this, or to have different base damages per class, or both. Especially for classes intended to be casters, it might not make sense to allow the m to bypass that intended gameplay in this way.
It would also probably be necessary for damage scaling from attributes to be effected by level. So, for instance, Strength may only add 1% at lvl 1, but up to 20% at level 55. (These rough numbers were based on a quick look at EE caps for tiers compared to how much strength you can get from those tiers.) Without this scaling, starting stats would most likely make barehand WAY too overpowered to justify any other weapons for the first few tiers. Trying to address this with per-level base damage seems like it would make it too underpowered at low levels. Fine-tuning the base damage might address this, but it seems like scaling the multiplier by level makes the most sense.
In terms of balancing the gear requisition process: Building up your gear sets is a major part of this game. Any balancing on this issue would be purely based on design intent, so this is super subjective (as opposed to the more objective matter of balancing the potential damage output versus other builds). Personally, I think this is an area of the game the needs more flexibility, for reasons I won't go into detail on. However, whatever your beliefs on this issue, the levers you would pull to balance on this aspect would involve taking a close look at how much +str/dex/whatever is needed to make the build viable, and how the challenge of gathering those gear sets compares to acquiring similar power levels in other builds. It probably wouldn't be ideal to creat a situation where, for any gap you have in your gear set, you can just fill in with you bare hands, and it won't matter. But, it think it would be beneficial to use different sets to fill in gaps, just like using a dagger or two in the middle of your sword set. Only, instead of needing a dagger with EE, you would use a dagger with +str, and swap to barehand.
What do you all think?? What interesting interactions would you include in this idea,that would make is a fun and diverse way to play the game?
Guests cannot view or vote in polls. Please register or login.