Note: Milestone 5 is not getting released. Instead, it's features will be added to Milestone 6.
The background of Milestone 5:
Since the summer release, and the 4.1 patch, work on the next milestone has been steadily chugging on. Now that the original goals have been accomplished, namely that we have the option to make distinct specialized character builds without crippling our character's overall power, it was time to turn our attention to other design and balance problems inherent in dungeon siege.
One such issue is how the hybrid classes had no drawbacks, but gained tons of versatility for multiclassing. Think about it: A Fist of Stone is only 30% less strength than a fighter, and almost the same melee level. At level 39, which is the start of broken world, this difference is about 30 strength, or about 10 flat melee damage and some health (and a tiny amount of mana). In exchange, you gain access to nature magic Wrath and Embrace buffs. You also get the opportunity to either make up for the lost strength entirely with Strength of Stone - and then some with Soul of Strength invested, or gain 8% life steal for free (significantly more with Soul of Protection even in vanilla).
Now you might be thinking "but the healing, summons and buffs are not as strong as a nature mage", but this comes on top of potentially the tankiest, or the most damaging character package, and you would be right, except that summons are unnecessary, buffs are good enough even with a fist of stone, (as they scale off nature magic skill rather than intelligence), and the best healing in this game is life steal. Think about it. You pop a power in the middle of a pack, the AoE immediately reduces the incoming damage that caused you to need healing in the first place, and you get a character back to full life. Anything else can usually be handled by potion usage.
Things are even more ridiculous with Blood Assassins: At their basest they lose about 10 ranged damage (and a tiny amount of health / mana), but gain a specialty that lets them boost their damage (not just base damage, but all flat additions from gear) to ridiculous levels at the cost of needing more life steal, incredibly powerful support powers (Rune of Sacrifice), an entire playstyle that lets them scale their damage entirely from shred blood procs, or to scale their damage via intelligence, while still having almost as good base damage as a pure ranged player. Oh if you just want to play a ranged character but more tanky you can use the spell Repulsion to gain extra armor.
Needless to mention, the strength/dexterity difference means even less when you can have 60-70 extra from your gear just by having some high-rarity items. The Marksman's Ring for example gives 80 dexterity by default. There is really no reason to play pure classes in this game and that is not very balanced, to say the least.
Oh and crossbows/2handed weapons barely have any extra damage in exchange for much slower attack speed, and since most damage additions are flat, they are easily outclassed by dual wielding, regular bow, or throwing weapon setups.
All these combined gave me the impetus for Milestone 5.
Milestone 5
Changes:
Strength and Dexterity are now multipliers to base weapon damage. This means two-handed melee weapons and crossbows benefit more from high dexterity than faster weapons and bows.
For diverging hybrids and pure classes a large package of related changes has been made:
- Biting Arrow now partially scales with Dexterity
- Dual Wield and Overbear now partially scale with Strength
- Strength of Stone now only scales with nature magic skill
- Shade's Agility now only scales with combat magic skill
- Strength-, Dexterity-, and Intelligence-boosting unique, magic, rare, and magic items had their boosts significantly reduced (66-80%, depending on the stat).
- Improved Weapon Enhancements has been significantly nerfed.
This means it is still possible to make a dexterity-stacking blood assassin, or strength-stacking fist of stone, but these hybrids won't automatically be better than pure melee or ranged characters.
Plans for Milestone 6:
Milestone 5 is not getting released as it's development is too intertwined with features in the works for Milestone 6 to be released separately. At the same time it is important for the project to develop in steady chunks, hence why it's internal name is retained.
An ongoing goal is reworking the tooltips for specialties, to show the values they have at levels 20 and 30. This should help players make better informed decisions. Some progress has been made for Milestone 5, but a large number of specialties still need updating.
The other goal, much more ambitious, is to rework both spells and the spellcasting system, as it is broken and unsatisfying. In the first dungeon siege, you naturally progressed from the tiny zap to the powerful (hah) Lightning Blast and Icefury, or from Fireshot through Explosive Powder to Fireball. In this game you start with Firebolt, switch to firespray on the next level, and end the game with firespray. Or start with Grave Beam and end with Grave Beam. The only difference is that you start with a "lesser" version of these spells, and end with either "greater" or "master" version, which is the same but has a higher cap before it's damage stops increasing with your intelligence.
To add insult to injury most spells take forever to cast compared to attacking with a bow or sword, so while they have impressive tooltip damage, their performance is strictly behind their melee and ranged counterparts, on top of costing mana and requiring the mages to invest in mana management. This means that of all the spells about 1 or 2 per element are viable.
I have two proposals to alleviate this problem.
First, variations of the same spell are differentiated by cast speed, damage, and mana cost: Lesser spells cast faster, deal less damage, have weaker special effects, and are more mana efficient. Normal spells remain as-is, Greater spells have increased mana cost and special effects/AoE, while master spells have even further increased mana costs (often double) and damage, mainly meant to be used in shorter bursts.
All the above assumes that the intelligence cap is raised to that of the highest spell in the group.
Second, and this ties to the first, spells will have special effects.
some example ideas:
- Casting a Fireball on an entangled target will free it from entanglement, and then inflict it with a special burn, on top of guaranteeing any regular ignite the caster can inflict.
- Lesser Fireball gives a weaker burn, while Greater Fireball burns harder.
- Iceball consumes any mark of fire, ignite, or special ignite on the target to amplify it's damage.
- Lesser iceball gives very little amplification while casting faster, but greater and master iceball are much stronger in this regard, and cast slower.
Further example ideas:
- Cold Snap chills enemies, making them easier to freeze
- Encase gets a base chance to freeze enemies
- Frost Beam deals bonus damage to chilled enemies
- Firebolt deals additional damage to ignited / special burn enemies.
- Firespray has better odds of causing ignites.
- Jolt will chain if hitting an enemy with static bolt
- Entangle will deal bonus damage to enemies with Static Bolt
- Ripple will deal bonus damage to blinded enemies.
and so on. At this point only the bonus damage vs certain status effect mechanic has been implemented, the rest are just ideas, but once these "elemental interactions" are developed, Dungeon Siege 2 could very well have the most in-depth spell system in it's history.
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