Heroes and abilities

[Seravy]

Because I can spare the slots on the accessory. Doing so won't make my hero hit any less hard with attacks, and I won't lose anything of critical importance.

For example, +8 Defense, +10 Casting Skill, Lionheart, Invulnerability plate mail, +4 Defense, +10 Casting Skill, Divine Protection, +3 Resistance accessory. There I have all the important Life realm powers, and +6 resistance which is enough to be immune to curses even if the hero isn't Charmed. If they are, I have 2 additional slots left empty.

On the weapon, I'd want +6 attack, +3 hit, +4 defense, illiusion ideally, with or without spell charges. Often I even want resistance or movement (if the hero has wind walking or needs more than 6 resistance). Losing any of these hurts so putting the skill there is a higher cost. If necessary we can even restrict more item powers to be weapon only, albeit there already are plenty. Oh yeah and weapon also has Spell Save. You often want Spell Save to go with casting skill and then you are already using two of your weapon slots. Three if you want charges as well.

That's why. It's also better for predefined items, we can make sure we don't make predefined items that have both high skill and good offense, forcing the player to choose one. This doesn't work on accessories because you can equip two and they have more slots and they can't have offense in them anyway.

(yes, like charmed on resistance, blademaster heroes also have it easier on weapons as they don't need the extra hit after they are high level. So they can have an extra free weapon slot compared to others, but at least it's only one. Charmed frees up 2-3 slots by substituting for 6-10 resistance.

[Nelphine]

I'm confused. 
You just stated that first paragraph as if it supports your argument that using only weapons is better, but for me, you've specifically said 'without spell skill, I have 2 slots empty'.

Is your point that you can get +20 skill from the two armor/accessories, so why would you bother with the +skill on weapons?

Because if it is, the answer is, you're giving up 2 slots, for defensive properties, and DEFENSE is what makes hero overpowered.

Hero offense is well balanced. It increases nicely through every tier. It matches summons nicely. Hero offense is in a great position. Gaining or losing even 2 or 3 item slots won't change this.

Hero DEFENSE makes them ludicrously overpowered, and able to solo stacks of 9 very rares. (Not all very rares, and not in every circumstance). 

If someone wants to use 2 item slots on their armor/accessory, and not use a weapon slot, that means the heroes OFFENSE has increased. But offense is in a good place, so who cares?

If they use 1 slot on a weapon, and free up 2 slots on armor/accessories, then the hero DEFENSE increases. And that is much more likely to break the game.

Sure, spell skill is easiest to compare when looking at offensive abilities - and sure, spell skill is most often used for offensive abilities.

But that isn't what makes heroes overpowered. If you give heroes more defensive slots, heroes become more problematical. So anything that costs defensive slots is actually a huge cost.

[Seravy]

I mean that i can't fill the 8 nonweapon slots all meaningfully. (exceptions apply, Life/Sorcery might)
But I have more than 4 things to fill my weapon already.

So i can put skill on an accessory for "free" as I don't need the slot for anything else.
I've usually had Caster on my items, not because I really needed but because I had a slot left over.
You don't have 8 slots worth of good defensive powers unless you play two realms. (and even if you do you might not need all of them. Merging and regeneration is usually enough for casters with Nature items, maybe with Elemental Armor against ranged and spell damage. You don't absolutely need invulnerability, etc on top of that. It's nice but not necessary, the hero is already immortal. In fact Regeneration by itself is enough as long as the hero has enough defense for surviving turn 1. Turn 1 is all you want for your strategy, right?)

You seem to assume I'm trading away a slot to gain the skill. On weapons this is true. On armor the slot was unused. (yes I had something in it but it wasn't important.)

btw defensive powers are things you can enchant on the hero. So the item missed invulnerability, ok I cast it on the hero. Even if they dispel I can put it back for 30 MP, and hey, what did I just put into that slot, extra MP? Cool.
Weapons don't do that. There is no buff that makes your attack illusion, doom, etc, there is none that adds +3 hit or +6 attack, or any of the other things you can and want to have on the weapon. So the armor slot, while better on its own merit, is less valuable anyway.

[Nelphine]

Regardless of the comparative power, defensive item slots are still what breaks heroes. Yes, you can just add casting skill in most cases. But giving up Wraithform or divine protection is a straight loss. Flight and invisibility are also invaluable. Those 4 powers do often make your hero completely invulnerable, and only dispelling can stop them - by using them as an item slot, you can't even dispel them.
Undispellable invulnerability is definitely a huge thing. Teleporting, regeneration, inner fire, MAGIC IMMUNUTY, all of these contribute to an hero that can solo 9 very rares.

Yes, it only occurs when you can get enough of these item powers at the same time. Yes that is rare. But THAT is what makes heroes broken. That is why I refuse to play heroes.

I don't care if your hero gets +10 to hit illusion strength 50 attacks. That simply does not break the game. I don't care if any of those individual things are stronger than any of the individual defensive powers I listed. The COMBINATION of defensive powers breaks the game. And reducing what choices there are for those slots makes it more likely that those rare combinations will occur, and that more players will abuse heroes.

[Seravy]

And reducing what choices there are for those slots makes it more likely that those rare combinations will occur,

Wrong. You're assuming players would play poorly and pick skill over other, good options. If that's true, I don't care, it's a low difficulty game or they are already losing it by the time they could create items like that. However if the players are competent they will never pick +10 skill over those OP defensive abilities, so it does not make it more likely those occur.

If you are referring to random generated items, then yes, it increases the chance, but random generated items are...garbage 90% of the time. I don't think I have ever seen one that had more than two of the four slots containing something that you'd consider gamebreaking.
Haste, Invulnerability accessory? Sure but it comes with -1 spell save and +2 resistance. And so on.

Chance is one thing but the overall budget of the item is limited. If you aren't actually finding a 3000+ budget legendary tier artifact which is like, I believe, restricted to, what, 0-3 per map treasure? But with the chance weighted in favor of exactly 1... anyway, if you aren't finding one of those, you can't get an item with 3-4 slots filled with high value item powers due to cost. (Yes, Wraith Form is an exception, it "only" costs 400, but the others cost 700-1000 each.)
Even 2k+ items are quite rare, each map only having 5-9 of them, and these have a pretty bad chance to be "good". Finally items only need to use 75% of the budget but random generated items don't, they work on a first come first serve basis so if the first abilities rolled don't use all the points they are wasted.
Also, even if the option is turned on, only 50% of the items is random, the rest are predefined. So realistically speaking only about 3 items per map has a chance to even roll 3 or more good abilities. The rest don't have the budget for it. And then the human payer needs to be the person who cracks those lairs and gets the item, which is not at all trivial and they are likely hard lairs.

So overall, random item quality is so bad still, it could use that minor improvement.

It might be worse for Plate Mails though which already get a very limited amount of powers. We should likely enable something else for those...

[Seravy]

By the way, while you only mention the turn 1 use of MP, that's not the only thing it can do.
MP can also be used as a very effective defensive item power : it allows the hero to gain hit points through casting Healing, Raise Dead, or Exaltation. Out of which the latter two effectively function as additional maximal hit points.
And they also enable the stack to recover more HP/turn than it would be able to if only the wizard could cast healing.
So ultimately, excess MP is a fairly big contributing factor to heroes being immortal, on par with defensive stats. (a weapon with 4x Exaltation spell charges might be the thing that can do the most for keeping your heroes alive in a single item slot. Probably on par with even Invulnerability. In fact it can heal Crack's Call damage so having 2 such heroes means you no longer need Wraith Forms as long as the enemy can't cast two spells a turn. )

Of course the enemy heroes will be casting damage spells so it kinda cancels out but only in the battle where your heroes go against the enemy capital. In all other battles, hero MP just helps the heroes survive with nothing on the other side to compete with that extra healing.

[Bahgtru]

Wrong. You're assuming players would play poorly and pick skill over other, good options. If that's true, I don't care, it's a low difficulty game or they are already losing it by the time they could create items like that. However if the players are competent they will never pick +10 skill over those OP defensive abilities, so it does not make it more likely those occur.

If you are referring to random generated items, then yes, it increases the chance, but random generated items are...garbage 90% of the time. I don't think I have ever seen one that had more than two of the four slots containing something that you'd consider gamebreaking.

I like the +5 and +10 items, casters can also shoot their magic attack, so in the early game using their entire MP on turn one - black prayer, say - and then shooting is quite common. Sure I wouldn't craft them, but finding one of them that allows to cast a higher level spell is quite useful. It also makes it cheaper on the wizard: if the witch can cast black prayer the wizard only needs to cast darkness, and that's a 10 mana saving. It's this kind of calculations that make lunatic winnable.

Of course the enemy heroes will be casting damage spells so it kinda cancels out but only in the battle where your heroes go against the enemy capital. In all other battles, hero MP just helps the heroes survive with nothing on the other side to compete with that extra healing.

Well that is for life. However, yes in general mana is useful - even for the other realms. Too much is too useful, agreed, but if we remove the +20 items I think we can bring it under control. I'd suggest cutting it to 10 and seeing how that goes. I for one would still use those random items.

[Seravy]

There is one small problem with Pandora's Box. I believe we want this to be rare on items, but random generated items have all item powers at equal chance to only the higher cost can make it more rare, and this one is fairly low cost. And there is no space to weight the probabilities. It's most definitely not something I want to see as often on random items as resist magic or flight, more like, once out of 3-4 games?
Predefined items are fine because we can decide how often it appears but random aren't.
(Necromancy is at least expensive so if it does stay it won't appear often anyway)

[Nelphine]

I dunno, I use predefined... I'd say put a poll up for it, and leave it up for a few months.

[Seravy]

I managed to find a way to make the random chance weighted.

The following table is the chance for each as currently added.
Chance is the number BEHIND the effect name.
This is how much chance out of the total (142) that power has to be chosen on each roll.

However, the first two slots on items costing 1500 or higher are special.
They use the same table but with modifications. Powers marked X cannot appear in these two slots, and powers marked "+" have that many higher chance to be chosen as the amount of + signs. This mechanism is there to ensure high budget items actually manage to use up a reasonable portion of the budget and don't end up crap 75% of the time - once all 4 slots are rolled any leftover value is simply lost in this sort of item generation, and I can't do anything about that, so it's better to ensure quality in advance. Generally there are far more "useless" or low value powers, so it's fairly easy to roll something cheap 4 times in a row, especially as some of the more expensive powers have a low weight in the "normal budget" table.
Do note the remaining two slots use the weaker table even on high value items so the chance of having 3 or more actually good powers is still not particularly high, merely acceptable.

Code:

; 00 " +1 Attack"           2    X
; 01 " +2 Attack"           3    X
; 02 " +3 Attack"           4    X
; 03 " +4 Attack"           3    X
; 04 " +5 Attack"           3
; 05 " +6 Attack"           1    ++
; 06 " +1 Defense"          3    X
; 07 " +2 Defense"          3    X
; 08 " +3 Defense"          2
; 09 " +4 Defense"          2
; 0A " +5 Defense"          1    +
; 0B " +6 Defense"          1
; 0C " +1 To Hit"           3    X
; 0D " +2 To Hit"           2  
; 0E " +3 To Hit"           1  
; 0F " +1 Movement"         3    X
; 10 " +2 Movement"         2    X        
; 11 " +3 Movement"         1
; 12 " +4 Movement"         1
; 13 " +1 Resistance"       3    X
; 14 " +2 Resistance"       3    X
; 15 " +3 Resistance"       3    X
; 16 " +4 Resistance"       1
; 17 " +5 Resistance"       1
; 18 " +6 Resistance"       1
; 19 " +5 Spell Skill"      5    X
; 1A "+10 Spell Skill"      3    X
; 1B "+15 Spell Skill"      2    X
; 1C "+20 Spell Skill"      2    X
; 1D " -1 Spell Save"       2    X
; 1E " -2 Spell Save"       2
; 1F " -3 Spell Save"       1
; 20 " -4 Spell Save"       1
; 21 "Flaming"              3    X
; 22 "Lightning"            2
; 23 "Chaos"                2    +
; 24 "Destruction"          2    X
; 25 "Vampiric"             2    X
; 26 "Death"                2    X      
; 27 "Divine Protection"    2
; 28 "Holy Avenger"         2    X
; 29 "True Sight"           3
; 2A "Resist Elements"      4    X
; 2B "Elemental Armor"      2
; 2C "Inner Fire"        3
; 2D "Stoning"              4    X
; 2E "Phantasmal"           2
; 2F "Guardian Wind"        3    X
; 30 "Haste"                2
; 31 "Resist Magic"         2
; 32 "Pandora Box"          1
; 33 "Wraithform"           2    +
; 34 "Cloak of Fear"        3    X
; 35 "Bless"                3    X
; 36 "Shadow"            3
; 37 "Invulnerability"      2
; 38 "Teleportation"        1
; 39 "Necromancy"           1
; 3A "Lion Heart"           2
; 3B "Water Walking"        2    X
; 3C "Regeneration"         1
; 3D "Pathfinding"          2    X
; 3E "Merging"              1
; 3F "Flight"               3
; 40 "Invisibility"         2