Balancing Gold Charges.

[Own]

Moving forward, the game seems like it's going to be impossible to balance around one of two assumptions:

You put all your points into getting a Gold skill charge, or you balanced your points between two silver charge skills.

A few Gold charges are enough to absolutely destroy Winter or the Enraged Gigaslime in record time.

I can only see a few ways to balance it.

1) Gold charges require a much, much longer timer for activating than Bronze or Silver Charge. Like 1-2 seconds of uninterrupted charging, if 3-5. This has a few bonuses. 'CastSpeed' actually becomes a relevant build to max towards, Perfect Guarding to shorten charge speed is now a pro-strat and comboing skills (like Dodging Strike) become even more appealing.

2) Gold charges have a cooldown, like Frosty Friend's beastmode. You can only use 1 skill's Gold Charge every 10-30 seconds? That would make getting several skills to Gold Charge appealing, to cycle between them. I'm not sure if this is the best idea though.

3) Gold charges have some sort of drawback. They reduce EP regen for a duration, or reduce EP to 0 after use, or... I don't know.

I just hope the next boss isn't a joke / next to impossible, depending on whether or not you pumped up a gold charge skill.

 

[HexZyle]

Before you go about nerfing every single Gold Charge, which skills are the problem here? Because perhaps they could individually have their charge speed or damage values tweaked? I have gold charge plant summon, and I see nothing wrong with it. (although I guess this nerf wouldn't affect it much)

 

[Own]

Pretty much every single Gold Charge skill is vastly worth more than a Silver Charge. And CastSpeed almost doesn't matter at all.

It would be nice if CastSpeed actually had a reason to exist, in the form of stretching out Gold Charges. Just nerfing damage is boring, Gold Charges should feel like something you're really powering up to and unleashing devestating effects with... just maybe not as spammable as they are right now. They have no 'weight' to them in terms of what's required to use them, you don't have to find a safe window to charge them up in battle.

 

[HexZyle]

Pretty much every single Gold Charge skill is vastly worth more than a Silver Charge. And CastSpeed almost doesn't matter at all.

Plant Gold Charge isn't worth casting if you are travelling, and especially not if you aren't going to cast at least 2-3 silver charges after it. It simply isn't any more powerful than its Silver Charge in a lot of situations.

It doesn't benefit from multiple casts, and its effect duration is infinite, so it only needs to be cast once, therefore both cast speed changes and a cooldown addition wouldn't affect it at all.

I thought cast speed had to do with how long it took for you to finish your cast animation, not how long the charge took...

 

[Teddy]

I agree with Own that most gold charges are preeeetty ridonculous right now! Not all of them, but quite a few!

I have ninja implemented a thing which, uh... might be interesting if used right, which is an armor penetration stat that applies on all spells depending on their charge level. Gold Charges have a 40 % arpen (which basically means 40 % defense reduction on enemies).

This could open some avenues for easier balancing in that the significance of using gold charges goes up as the monsters gain DEF, and monster DEF could be made a more significant stat on Hard, for example. The idea is that that would allow us to dial down some of the biggest damage dealers a bit, bringing them closer to their Silver Charge brethren, but having Gold Charges still be extra effective against big bad things.

Again, this hasn't exactly been tried out in practice (since the arpen right now is only gravy on top of massive damage).

I also agree that the optimal theoretical balance would be to somewhat retain the OP-ness and instead have more nuanced strategical drawbacks. We'll see how close we can get to that...

Both cooldown and a larger charge time gap before the final charge are good ideas to have in mind!

I thought cast speed had to do with how long it took for you to finish your cast animation, not how long the charge took...

Right not it only affects charging speed. Having it affect the animations is on the table though. I've been meaning to implement a test and let Fred & Vilya try it out, but haven't gotten around to it!

 

[HexZyle]

The Earth spike also I would disagree, it's hard enough getting out Silver charges (that do around 700 damage) because you have to sit still for a full 2 seconds to charge up and unleash. In fact, the only time I get silver charges out with the Earth Spike is when someone else is aggroing everything, I achieve a perfect guard (in which I just drop it straight on the mob that attacked me), or I'm kiting a mob that'd never catch me anyway, like Yetis.
The gold charge doubles the damage to 1400, while taking around 2.5 seconds to cast, (if you increased that any longer there'd be no way you'd ever be able to use this attack against pretty much anything)