Gate of Babylon

Gate of Babylon

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[Suggestion] Balancing and Design philosophy

Estrelaura opened this issue ยท 0 comments

commented

Of course nothing i say here should be taken as absolute, but as i see of now, the mod is overall op to the point of rendering vanilla weapons useless. I've come up with some general design guidelines and specific weapon balancing to solve this issue, please feel free to discuss.

General:

-Weapons should take in account DPS instead of raw damage and attack speed individually for damage balancing. The attack intervals are something pretty easy to adapt to and should be taken in account only for playstyle preferences. Most weapons in the mod have higher DPS than swords and even higher than axes, rendering them useless as there's only the temporary challenge of adapting to the new attack speeds. No weapon should have a DPS higher than a sword, as it's the to-go all-round solution for a weapon. Other weapons should focus on their quirks instead.

-Similarly, enchantments should be allowed and restricted individually for each weapon type in order to balance what each fully enchanted weapon would be using the fully enchanted sword as the reference. Weapons should strike a balance between unique and eficient, without a right choice to make.

-Lastly, cost shouldn't be a factor in balancing, at most it should dictate weapon durability. When it comes to weapon tiers, they are more about rewarding/challenging the player in relation to the tier they are in the progression than it is about the cost. If you have the tools to get 2 iron ingots, you have the tools to gather 5. The same goes for diamond and specially netherite, which always take only one ingot to upgrade. Repair costs are also roughly the same between all items of a tier, and all of them are bought from villagers at similar prices. As a last argument, think about the classic exaggeration that comes from the meme: Just because clay is rare doesn't mean that a set 3x better than diamond made out of compressed clay is balanced.

Daggers:

-Not only they have higher DPS than swords, its attack speed is also higher, making it easly spammable and more efficient, even taking the lower reach by account. I suggest lowering the damage by 1 per tier, altough slightly lowering the attack speed is another solution. Both would be overkill.

Spears:

-Sits too comfortably in the rost as a trident replacement, an item that's supposed to be quite rare. Altough even the netherite spear is not quite as good, it could make the player comfortable enough to ignore tridents, specially considering enchantments. The best solution that comes into my head is drastically lowering its enchantment pool. Please forgive me as i couldn't check enchantments in the mod, but here is some blind enchantment balancing: Limiting or removing damage enchantments altogether. Level 3 should be the max. No trident exclusive enchantments other than loyalty 1. Mutually exclusive ranged enchantments. Either power or sharpnes, fire aspect or flame, and so on. Melee enchantments wouldn't be applied to the projectile and vice versa. No sweeping edge. Limited piercing could be interesting.

Broadswords:

-Better than swords AND axes, despite having a design philosophy similar to the latter. Needs a nerf both in damage (minus 1-2 points) and attack speed (0.75-0.8)

Rapiers:

-Extremely high DPS, due to the weapon design i suggest lowering the damage in all the tiers. Also no sweeping edge or sweeping attack at all. It doesn't make much sense with the weapon irl, nor with the design, which is better suited to defeat singular enemies one by one.

Haladies:

-Just need slightly lower attack speed (-0.1 maybe), since the double hit makes the DPS slightly higher than a sword.

Waraxes:

-Well balanced. :)

Katanas:

-Again with the DPS too high, i think the damage should be lowered a bit. The target DPS should be closer to an axe, since the slash attack is already too good of an offensive tool even without enchantments.

Bows:

-The vanilla bow is already too good. Maybe increasing all draw speeds including the wooden bow could make the tiers and quick draw more relevant without breaking the balance too much.

Nothing really to say about yoyos and shields, but as for boomerangs:

-The range combined with the nature of the weapon makes it really easy to kill enemies quickly at a very safe range. I'd suggest lowering damage by 20%