Hello everyone. Long time lurker/backer, but figured it was time to come out of the shadows and pose a question to the development team and the community.
The question is fairly simple. What do you think of hard stat caps?
Example: Critical strike hard capped at 10%. This would mean that no matter what you do to your character, once you hit that 10% you can no longer advance to 11% ever. I think hard stat caps are great for balance and as a player you feel accomplished when you hit a hard stat cap as well because you know you have reached maximum power and can focus on something new. This scenario also allows the hard stat cap to be increased down the road with future expansions. However, this is not to say I want every player in the world to be at 10% crit. I hope stats matter enough that you would have to choose to specialize in critical strike over other stats like haste to make your character unique. That being said, I wish to pose a follow up question with an additional twist to the first question:
If hard stat caps exist, would you be for or against abilities having fixed modifiers applied for class flavor?
Example - A rogue is stealthed and uses an ability: strike from the shadows. The ability has a fixed 50% critical strike chance instead of being based on the raw 10% critical strike hard cap. This would help to alleviate ability/skill balance for the devs because one player may have 7% crit chance and another has 20%. With a variance that large, the ability/skill may need to be toned down to only deal a small amount of damage because a minority of players are dealing too much damage because they made the perfect build. All too often without stat caps, this leads to abilities/skills having to be balanced for the wrong reasons. This can lead to an ability/skill being nerfed due to a small pool of players figuring out the perfect rogue build for damage. Which then leads to a dead ability that almost no one would use because it is no longer optimal for any gameplay.
In closing I think by having a hard cap on stats and adding in special modifiers for certain class abilities, this allows the development team to really add unique flavor to each class without having the nightmare of balancing an ability/skill for everyone's uncapped stats. They can balance mobs and boss encounters much easier because they will know the rough parameters each person will be within with lower levels of variance.
Thanks for reading my questions and I am curious to see what this great community thinks about this topic and I can't wait to read the responses.
I personally prefer soft caps, like what Dark Souls does.
You hit 20 dexterity, and it's less effective to put more points in. Hit 40, and it is significantly less worthwhile to put some in, but you still get some benefit, all the way up to the limit at 99.
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It forces players to make more balanced characters.
Which is why I'm not sure it fits in Pantheon. The more dedicated our characters are to very specific roles, the better.
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Fixxed modifiers are definately a cool idea, but I don't know if they are good or not. It depends on how much VR wants to do all that balancing.
I suppose it has a somewhat observable macro effect and I guess it seems hard caps would fit a game with meaningful role identities and synergies more? But I'm thinking it's something that is very complex and subtle and that VR will know better how it fits in with the game.
Welcome to posting on the forums, SweetSauce.
BeaverBiscuit describes a system with a hard cap of 99. With the cost of raising the ability or attribute increasing as you near the cap. This sounds perfectly reasonable to me largely for the reasons given by the OP.
As to the comment that it may not fit in Pantheon because of the focus on characters playing specific roles - that would be true if there was only one ability or attribute relevant to a specific role. It would not be good to force all DPS characters, for example, to max out their DPS and then put points into tanking or healing because of a hard cap. But since there will be many attributes and abilities that support each role I see no problem with a hard cap forcing a DPS character to focus on two or three or four of them instead of just one.
I have no problem with hard caps on main stats like str and dex etc. But I don't think there should be hardcaps on secondary stats like dodge and crit. If you want to sacrifice other stats to male a 50% crit wizard, I think you should be able to do so.
Having Hardcaps on secondary stats just homogenizes characters once they begin to obtain better gear, leaves no room for customization.
Pantheon will have both, or at least we've been told we'll have both but it remains to be seen if that statement actually makes it to release. I prefer stats where there is some maximum and you get diminishing returns the closer you try to get to that point, never quite reaching it.
There should not be stat caps hard or soft. The cap should be based on available items and spells in the world. The game should be balanced right from level 1 onward, where the need to go back and revisit caps every time you raise level is just not there from the start.
bigdogchris said:There should not be stat caps hard or soft. The cap should be based on available items and spells in the world. The game should be balanced right from level 1 onward, where the need to go back and revisit caps every time you raise level, is just not there from the start.
While I fully expect to see soft caps, this pure method is what I have always preferred. True glass cannon options.
In terms of secondary stats and hard caps, I think the hard cap for any secondary stat should be 100%. Any more than that and there is no benefit on performance. As for soft caps I'm not a huge fan of seeing diminishing returns. If you can stack crit armor, and that is what you want to do, then you shouldn't be penalized with early diminishing returns for building this way. Now I do think there should be a "true cap" limit established by proper balance, itemization, and potential buffs. As for what this true cap limit is I don't really know, but it probably wouldn't reach the hard cap of 100% in most cases.
For combat stats, I don't think there should be a hard cap. However, there should be a true cap based on itemization paths, buffs, racial passives, and general balance.
I do not like hard caps, I would hate to think that I could ever max out on Swagger. Swagger is one of those stats you can always have more of, I would hate to be in a world where I knew that I couldn't have more swagger tomorrow than I have today. You could do other things though, like if you have a crap ton of accuracy once you hit where you cannot miss an enemy then the extra accuracy could do something like add damage or add crit chance or crit damage or something like that.
I am 100% against hard caps. Well, I am against artifical hard caps where there is some algorithm that "stop" stats adding. I AM FOR hard caps that occur naturally from gear. So if you had access to get the MAX stam in game from gear, then that is your hardcap, and then the buffs and mastery points/AA etc etc will be added on top of that.
I really feel that adding hard caps is really rather lazy. Everybody will have access to the same gear (well, all chain wearers can wear the same, all leather can wear the same, etc etc). So the gear should be balanced anyways. Secondly, if they are worried about people maxing out a stat by gear alone, and then worry about buffs/mastery points boosting them "too high" well then that is really the classes identity. If a scout and a warrior can both get 120 points of stam, but then a warrior has a buff to boost them another 20stam, well then that is perfectly in line with the class. It makes sense.
Soft caps are hard to discuss because it really depends on how harshly the dimishing returns are. I have seen dimishing returns that were so harsh they were virtually hard caps, but I have seem some dimishing returns that were barely noticeable. If we did soft caps...I would really like them to be SOFT. I should be able to boost a stat if thats what I really want to do. I really HATE artificial blocks in games like that.
The game should be designed well enough that it doesn't encourage maxing out a single stat. It should really punish you for being a glass cannon. Or it should punish a tank for boosting stam and ignoring everything else. As in, if a tank boost his stam thats great...but his his avoidance is on the floor because he ignored agi/dexteritiy.
Im really against any artificial restrictions.
