So I've been playing a lot more Legendary Heroes as of late and I've begun to have some pet peeves that nag me. Overall, the game is great and fun, a definite improvement over the past two titles. However, outside my previously mentioned opinion on the lack of naval.. anything... I've found hero experience is one aspect of the game that's dragging the fun down. Here's the problem:
Experience bonus traits and experience 'sharing' between heroes.
These two issues frustrate me more than anything due to the simple reasons that the bonuses are mandatory traits and the experience penalty on heroes makes early game heroes more or less unrest buff bots. These unhappy souls sit in cities doing nothing until you can afford units to protect them out in the wilderness, which can take a while, depending on your faction.
I've seen these mentioned in passing before, but I haven't seen a thread dedicated to them yet. So if I missed one and am being redundant, I apologize in advance. Yet, these two issues continue to plague me as they heavily restrict freedom in the early game. On the one hand, the experience traits are mandatory because if you do not take them, you gimp your heroes because most (if not all) of the AI takes them. So to keep up with the Joneses, you must wade through 3-4 traits that do nothing for your hero except make them level faster. Not fun.
On the other hand, the hero experience penalty for having more than one hero in an 'army' means that the early game sees someone sitting on the bench once you get your first (or even second) hero in addition to your sovereign. Couple this with no way to gain exp from governing until you get the Adventurer's Guild and you have basically a glorified enchantment in the form of unrest reduction sitting at level 1 for.... a while. Again, not fun.
Both these issues make the early game in terms of hero development and party selection very linear. Why bring several champions if they'll only all slow down leveling and be crushed by a high level AI sovereign later down the road? For the same reason, why not take all the exp bonuses you get along with having your heroes off on their own? To do otherwise risks the aforementioned crush scenario. There's no real variation, and in some cases, you actually have to slow down your fame accumulation or you'll have a harem of heroes doing nothing but sucking up pay and exp all for unrest reduction because you have no room for them in your armies without the experience penalty.
My solution to both these problems is simple:
1) Remove all experience bonus traits.
They add nothing to the game, are tedious, boring, and are mandatory to stay competitive with the AI. In short, they delay the fun parts of hero leveling as you don't really start picking traits until level 5-6.
2) Ease the experience penalty on multi-hero armies.
I understand that the probable reason for this change was to stop stacks of army munching heroes from destroying everything. But that was back when actual army units were far less useful than they are now. Furthermore, you can still have an experience penalty, just have it a gradient where the more heroes you have in an army beyond a certain point (two or three, for example) the more severe the experience penalty becomes.
The result of both the above changes frees up the early game and character development to be less linear and not having a mad dash just to keep up with the AI in terms of leveling. You wouldn't be forced to take experience boosting traits and you wouldn't have early game heroes doing nothing but yelling at villagers to stop relieving themselves on your Monument. As an added benefit, your early game force would be less screwed over if they took early losses, as now you could bolster unit loses with your champions without worry of penalty.
In short, I think these changes would make the game more fun and less artificially structured in the early game.
P.S. I should also extend a personal thanks to Stardock for the free copies of both Fallen Enchantress and now Legendary Heroes. I think, despite the flop that War of Magic might of been, I got the better end of the deal as both FE and LH combined were more than worth the 60 bucks I sunk into WoM.
I had doubts regarding the xp split too, but looking at these figures I would say that the xp split system is fair enough. It seems fine to me.
I'll still take the traits, but only on certain builds, such as a Brilliant Altar General Mage with Air 2, or a Trainer Commander. I tend to play very long, epic paced, dense everything games, so will be able to get the most out of them.
Fair is a loaded word. I would wonder, who would put two other champions with the sovereign if it meant being 4 levels below what the sov would be otherwise? Do those two champions add that much value to the stack? I would say they almost never do, and in most cases you can accomplish the same or better results with just units in the stack.
Some of it is that one side is looking at the glass as half-empty and the other as half-full. One side sees 33% as much experience as a lone hero, the other sees the numbers for all three add up to 100%. I see it as 3 times as much labor to get the same place, others see the map as an XP economy to harvest and not splitting is multiplying your returns. I think appeals to fairness hit this divide in the camps. I think no split is fair because I look at one number, the other side looks at the other.
If there is a solution that appeals to both sides it would be ideal. Maybe just no split for the sovereign would go a long way. I think some creative solution that encourages using heroes together would make the game more fun for people that don't look at the map as an XP crop to harvest.
Perhaps I've never gotten a hero high enough to be amazingly uber or something. But I've found that trained units rapidly outstrip heroes due to access to the same equipment but in groups. A unit of cavalry is able to take a considerable amount of punishment and deal excellent damage. Add in a unit of Skirmishers (horse riders with light armor and bows). Now that you can upgrade them, they don't need to be replaced when you get new weapons.
By mid-game, my heroes are doing a fraction of the damage that my trained units do. Guys who have been around a while who are level 5-6 have a whole lot of hit points.
I suppose that if you find one of the rare weapons (+25 attack or whatnot) you can have a hero that's damn strong. But I've found that a unit of Paladins (chainmail, longsword, kite shield, horse, chain belt, two magic amulets, charge trait, accuracy trait) end up doing most of my damage. Typically they move six square per turn, so they can hit and often kill an enemy unit before they get to move.
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Based on the XP split, I now run my heroes with an army. If I don't have enough units (can't afford the upkeep, etc) I sit them in a border town. This time around (this is the first game I've tried this), my heroes are of course leveling twice as fast (I used to run two heroes per army).
Normally what this means is that my armies have lost some flexability (can't cast as many or as many kinds of spells).
So behavior wise, the XP split has encouraged the following:
1. One hero per army
2. If I don't have enough units the hero sits in a town, not leveling and generally being boring.
3. The use of fewer heroes
So I guess my questions are this:
1. What are we trying to accomplish with the XP split? Keep you from using two (or more) heroes? A 50% hit is enough to make me scrap the idea.
2. Are heroes really too powerful? They have access to the same equipment trained units do plus some decent items (hell, most of the time when I get longswords, I equip my heroes with them because they are better than whatever they have).
3. What level of XP hit is acceptable? I was actually thinking about what level of XP hit I would take, and I was thinking the progression should be 20% per additoinal hero, so 80% at two, 60% at three, 40% at 4+. Perhaps I'm too generous?
Thus, these traits are mostly for long games, and in my opinion should only be taken on a champion who gets a large benefit from having additional levels (e.g., a spellcaster whose primary spells deal damage for each level of the champion).
I don't mean to pinch the bubble you're blowing, but, like Azunai before you, isn't this raw data taken in a vacuum presented as practical fact?
For instance, a higher level hero gaining exp faster can tackle higher challenges (monsters, quests, armies, ect) than one lower level and thus gain more exp via opportunities due to their (in the beginning) marginal advantage. Thus the problem isn't the flat exp gain one gains through these traits but the snowball effect of what faster exp means in a game based around levels = power.
You can't take these numbers in a vacuum and expect them to play out the exact same way in game situations and claim they're just fine and dandy.
However, even if that were the case, that's still no defense for exp boosting traits as a good gameplay mechanic. If they're mandatory, they're boring and make the game unfun. If they're a newbie trap, they're boring and make the game unfun. Take your pick, but whatever side you're on, I don't see why they should exist.
I gave my opinion. If yours is different, then that's fine. I personally don't feel that Potential is worthwhile on its own, and think that generally speaking you get more from having a real trait than from having the +1 accuracy/spell resistance/spell mastery and +2 health a fraction of a level early. I consider this to be true for Warriors, Defenders, Commanders, and probably Assassins, but on Mages I tend to take both Knowledge and Potential since I generally prefer direct-combat mages, and they tend to have a lot of level-dependent spells.
I also only gave my opinion at the end of the post, rather than mixing it in with the data. You can draw whatever conclusions you want to from the data I gave, and it should be relatively easy to take what I gave and separate it from my opinion (which, I might add, is intended 'as a general rule', but not as an absolute). There are situations where taking the experience-boosting traits might be more reasonable than others, and there are situations where they are not useful. I tend to feel that Warrior/Defender/Assassin champions get more out of their class traits than from levels, so unless I'm planning for a long game I probably won't take Potential on that type of champion. The data is there if you want to supplement your gameplay experience with something less anecdotal, and if you want to take it and theorize without reference to the game, go ahead. The opinion I gave is based off of my gameplay experience (I've done things both ways at various times - taking all the experience-boosters as soon as possible, and taking none of them, and sometimes taking one somewhat later in the game), and the data I have seems to support my experiences. If your experiences differ, that could be an effect of your playstyle, or your preferred game settings, or any number of other things.
Now, my rationale:
The faster leveling is only marginally faster. You can approximate how many fractions of a level ahead you are essentially by a linear interpolation between the points I gave. Compared with a champion of level x who has no experience boosts, a champion with Potential would be about 0.05*x levels ahead, and a champion with Knowledge would be about 0.08*x levels ahead.
Moreover, most of what champions get out of gaining a level is the trait that they pick. Thus, picking Potential instead of, for example, Lethal is sacrificing power now for the promise of power later, and some of the traits you are putting off for later could be a rather significant amount of immediate power (for example, if your champion has an attack rating of 10, and you have the option of picking a trait for +3 attack, that represents a roughly 40% increase in the damage that champion can do; Potential will not match this until you get to be at least one full level ahead, because until then you don't have any more traits with direct benefits than you'd normally have, and the basic level bonuses are generally insignificant compared to the trait bonuses on champions).
Beyond that, most of the higher-end bonuses aren't really as much of an advantage as you might think - in the early game, when your attack rating is 10, +3 attack is great, as it then represents a bonus of about 40% to the damage you deal per hit; later on, when your attack rating is up around 20 or 30, this only represents a damage bonus of 10-15%. Evoker IV isn't as good as you might think it is - +20% spell damage sounds great, but this is applied to the base damage of the spell, so when you compare a mage with Evoker III and a mage with Evoker IV who have equal numbers of shards, the Evoker IV mage is only doing about 12.5% more damage than the Evoker III mage, if the spell damage is independent of level. If you have the need for spell mastery, then each Prodigy trait is equal to five levels (or more, if the bonus is more than +5 spell mastery - I don't remember if that's the correct bonus for Prodigy), and at 1 spell resistance per level the extra level you might have doesn't counteract it, though I will say that spell resistance and spell mastery have rarely been a significant problem for me. The same argument applies for the spell resistance traits available to defenders; +1 accuracy being a level ahead let you go from (for example) an 80% chance to hit something to an 81% chance to hit something, so since level generally doesn't have anything to do with your attack rating the damage your non-spellcasting champions deal is essentially independent of their level, and +2 health is mostly useful for low-level champions, particularly before large units of trained troops or monsters start to become common opponents. About the only time levels, independent of traits, grant power for champions is when you primarily use something that does level-dependent damage (certain spells, a handful of rare weapons) or when you have something that grants a decent per-level bonus (e.g. a shield that grants +1 defense per level).
The Commander-line trait that lets all of your units move immediately is just about the only high-level trait I can think of that is really impressive compared to what a champion just one level off from having it can do, and you could have that by level 10 if you wanted to, or level 11 if you took Potential - but you get your basic champion up to level 10 on less unmodified experience than it takes to get the Potential champion to level 11. Only if you're taking it at some point past level 20 will your Potential champion have earned less unmodified experience than your basic champion in order to get to it, and since in my experience most of my champions more or less stop leveling somewhere between levels 10 and 15, if there's a trait deep in the tree that I want, this means that Potential on its own is never useful to me, since to have the same number of power-granting traits I have to have at least one extra level compared to non-Potential champions, and this is never cheaper for the Potential champion in terms of base experience than the preceding level until you're up to level 20. For Knowledge, this break comes in around level 12, and for Knowledge and Potential, this comes in around level 9 (but unfortunately, with Knowledge and Potential you've sacrificed two power-granting traits, which shifts the less-base-experience-for-same-number-of-power-granting-traits point up to level 18 on the non-Potential champion).
This is my rationale for why I think Potential, on its own, is only particularly useful for long games where you want champions to reach high levels. If you have additional experience boosters to tack on to Potential (e.g., a +10% bonus that lets you consider Potential on a non-mage to be equivalent to Knowledge on a mage who lacks that extra +10%), then it could be a different story, depending on what exactly you need out of your champions.
Insightful, but it doesn't address everything.
One part you're omitting from your equation is level dependent (and to an extent, trait dependent) weapons and equipment. These are power multipliers tumbled along with traits, hit points, and attack, which as you said isn't significant on its own. Put them together and with support, it can make a difference. As such a higher level hero can, like I said, tackle things a hero slower leveling cannot by virtue of all the boons they get by being 'first', thereby gaining more exp by being able to take on things that give the exp. This could potentially be boosted further with the exp bonus for taking on higher level creeps, depending on the circumstances. That's not even mentioning the meta-effects of gold, fame, and troop exp, to name a few other side effects of being a higher hero level taking on higher level monsters, quests, and armies.
Second, it still doesn't go to the point that exp boosting traits don't add anything to the game in terms of fun factor. Like I said in my earlier post, if they're not worth it, why have them in the game? If they provide a boost you cannot help but take, but do nothing fun, why are they in the game?
The overall problem has changed somewhat since I initially posted this thread, as Potential I, II, and III were folded into just Potential. So yes, you're data does support the fact that Potential by itself is rather meh in most cases. But again, why have it at all? Knowledge + Potential is still potent for reasons we've both pointed out, but differ on the details. Yet, whether or not they're potent, useless, or semi-useful, the question we really should be asking is are they fun traits that add to the game?
I say no, they do the opposite.
I totally agree with the potential traits (and the trait in mage or w/e that gives +25% exp) I found myself in my 3rd game turning on cheats just to bump my heroes up past that level the moment I got them just so I could go to the fun bits, which obviously bumped my heroes ahead game wise and made me much stronger than normal.
I've only read the OP and a few other posts on the first page and I agree with taking these traits out.
I don't like the xp sharing at all, I've only played with 6 DM's, 1 of them did a split similar to this game where we each got a portion of the exp based on how many of us there are, another did it based on our damage output, and later switched it because our healer wasn't getting shit for exp. Every other has just given us the exp and everyone gets the same. Point being it just shouldn't be there, they're all fighting in the fight, they all get the same experience from it.
One thought is to do what I did with my exp, give bonuses for things in combat, such as cool combo's between pc's and other small things, this could be your potential replacement. Have dynamic specials on each character in the fight which increase they're exp gain at the end of the fight and are deleted, probably wouldn't be hard to implement considering it's basically just a slow or growth like spell. The hard part would be storing amounts of damage dealt and other things for transferring them or determining when they're placed and who on. I actually thought of this WHILE writing this, may try and implement this in a mod at some point (if I manage to get time to take up modding )
Anyway. Theres that wall of text.
For weapons, it's also usually +1 or sometimes +2 damage per level. This means that a level 21 Potential champion is getting only a +1 or +2 maximum damage advantage over a level 20 normal champion (against a basic maximum damage of 20 or 40 just from the per level portion, that isn't much of a difference), and although you do have times when you're fractions of a level ahead, a single trait for +3 attack is going to be about as good as even +2 unresisted elemental damage (even with 10 base attack against 60 defense, +3 attack translates into roughly +1 maximum damage, and against anything less than 15 defense it translates into more than +2 maximum damage, and this gets worse for the +X damage per level as the base attack value gets higher - on 30 base attack, you get an additional 2 or more maximum damage from a +3 attack trait against anything with less than 45 defense, and at 20 base attack, it's against anything with less than 30 defense). Granted, only Warriors get the attack bonus traits, but I would expect that increased critical chances or defense bypass would do something similar for Assassins, and unless your Defenders have access to Guarded Strike you don't really want them to attack anyways.
Linear level-dependent bonuses tend to suffer as the champion level goes up, too, since +2 unresisted elemental damage per level might represent a 50% increase in damage per attack at low levels, but at mid levels it looks more like +10% damage, and at high levels it becomes almost nothing (if I can hit for 40 damage each attack, I don't really care about getting an extra 2 damage per hit by going up a level, but if I can only hit for 5 damage on each attack, that 2 damage bonus is much more valuable). Since Potential doesn't give you that extra level advantage very quickly (especially at low levels), and since the damage bonus starts to become small relative to your basic damage at the preceding level once you reach level 8 or so, there isn't that much of an advantage to being that fractional level ahead.
Also, in my experience these types of weapons and equipment are rare enough that you shouldn't design a champion around using them, and if the enemy army is difficult enough that having no more than a +2 maximum damage advantage over what you'd normally have makes the difference between victory and defeat, you probably should have waited a bit.
yeah i think killing potential 2 & 3 was not the best solution. potential 1 on its own is very weak. imo a sensible solution would have been to scrap potential 1 & 2 and leave the 25% version of the trait (the former potential 3). a 25% boost is a real choice - the return of investment is around level 12, which is a level you will most likely reach (at least with some of the heroes) before the game is over. so you'd have the choice of getting a real trait that helps now - or sacrifice one trait now to get faster level ups within a somewhat reasonable time frame. i'd probably still skip it with most champs, but i can see how it would be a soild choice for a game where you focus on only 1-2 champs and ignore the rest. the 15% boost is never a good choice, unless you want to keep playing long after the game is decided and get your sov to level 30 or whatever.
Heh, seriously though, when added to other possible XP boosting modifiers, of which there are a plenty, it adds up. I'd still rather see it back at 25% though, make it much more useful.
That's the problem though, they add up, so if you don't pick potential you get the other XP benefits anyway. The 15% one costs a level that you can't make worthwhile until it puts +2 levels ahead (1 actual trait) of whatever the baseline is.
Extra bonuses don't get you to the breakeven point or the +1 trait any faster. In fact, iif you have more bonuses, the breakeven point and the +1 trait get pushed back, though I don't know how far.
For instance if you have 30% modifiers anyway, the +15% modifier gives you a total 45%. The extra 15% is only (0.15/1.3) an 11.5% increase in XP. So it is even worse if you have extra % modifiers. Whatever modifiers you were going to have anyway will reduce the actual total % increase you get from taking potential and knowledge, making them an even worse deal.
I get your point concerning Potential and Knowledge, and don't think they are worth picking on their own. I'm more referring to bonuses that don't require you to spend a level increase to get. Such as the trainer line on a separate hero or henchman(10-40% to army), the Heroic(double quest xp) and Brilliant(10%) traits, the Altar racial bonus(10%), the General profession(25% to army) and enchanted items(at least 2 with 10%), as well as Tutelage(25%), which does technically cost a level for the Air 2 pick.
That's a lot of bonuses.
That is a lot of bonuses, but paradoxically each one of those you take makes Potential and Knowledge a worse deal. If you took all of them, I don't think you would ever break even on spending a level for potential or knowledge. That is a 130% increase maximum, so potential is worth a (.15/2.3) 6.5% increase and knowlede is a (.25/2.3) 10.8% increase. Whatever bonuses you get that don't cost levels become the new baseline, and the benefit of the XP trait is the proportion it would increase that baseline if you took it. So all the breakeven and +1 trait calculations would have to be redone.
The only way potential and knowledge could possibly be worthwhile at some point is if you didn't take any other bonuses, or at least very few.
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