[Wicht] YBA Questions (And some new powers for looking over)

[Kalanyr]

Does the Energy Drain power reduce the damage from Holy Light from 4 points to 3?

Is Life Drain actually balanced? It has 3 Pre-requisites, admittedly but these are all reasonable themselves (Undead=Toughness) and Energy Drain (No real comparison quite powerful though ) and costs the same XP as Holy Strike but does its damage to far more creatures. To do this as weapons it would cost 80 yen or 80 xp.

Energy Drain also negates the Holy Strike power while leaving Unholy Strike inflicting its full 2 hits on the Holy Warrior, if the Undead also has Life Drain, this damage increases to 3 Hits/hit vs the meager 1 Hit/hit the Holy Warrior is dealing..

Another thing is that the Holy Warrior path has far more banned powers (Poison Blade,Dirty Trick,Chair Shot,Assassin,Flexible Style,Bounty Hunter) (Some of these are avoidable by picking them before or after you take Holy Warrior, but break path flavour quiet a lot) than the Unholy Warrior (Purity of Focus).

Also why is Purity of Focus so expensive? I remember you said something about negating another power costing more but Shove costs 2XP and can negate Fist of Fury (5XP). Purity of Focus is only really viable if taken on a Holy Battery.

 

[Wicht]

Oh come on - I spent a whole 6 hours originally writing the rules for YBA and you want balance

Actually you are right on almost all counts.

Energy drain reduces holy light by 1.

Though only recently play-tested for the first time, Life drain is clearly unbalanced and very powerful (as demonstrated by Kalath's fight with some vampires - Kalath can normally take anything twice as powerful as him in a one on one fight but the vampires are giving him a bit of a run)

-edit - oops finger slipped and hit return at the wrong moment - rest of the post to follow shortly

 

[Wicht]

-continued from previous post

-Playtesting has convinced me that the unholy warrior is more powerful then the holy warrior (though the holy light seems to almost compensate)

And purity of focus may need tweaked.

Now having said all that, the question becomes, what am I going to do about it?

And the answer at the moment is... probably not a lot...

Purity of Focus can be reduced in price if it needs to be. I haven't actually seen this in play yet myself but if you can make a reasonable arguement for what you feel the price should be, go for it.

I am reluctant to make huge changes however to the holy warrior/unholy warrior until I have finished seeing how unbalanced it is at the higher levels (say up around 20 hits). I also have not seen a lot of the holy warrior powers in use yet. So you might say I still want to see the playtesting. To this end if you have an encounter that you think demonstrates a weakness of the rules, let me know (provide a link). I am reluctant to patch here and there as IMO the patches will often created new problems if not thought out well. I think what we should do is finish play-testing and then do a rewrite of the whole thing if we think the game is fun enough to insure it sticks around a while longer.

As for the Life drain ability (and even the energy drain) - these will really only be an issue to me if a player decides to take them - but for monster abilities it actually makes the monsters about equal to the players (again at high levels). The game is very unbalanced (after about 8 hits) in favor of the player character due to weapon and yen accumalation. This is fine but does mean that the judge needs something a bit tougher to throw at the players. My advice would be, when creating a dungeon/adventure to keep the energy drain and life drain in reserve to make the "boss" encounters more challenging and interesting.

Also, let me add - The lich Wicht of Wicht's lair will be a 50 hit encounter. Anytime a group (or just one) of you decides you want to take him on, I can start that thread and make sure you know where to find him. If Wicht is beat I will consider playtesting to be over.

 

[Kalanyr]

Unfortunately, Sollir's character Demitri already picked up Energy Drain and Life Drain and is as I expected doing horrendous damage. The last log I posted (Demitri and Kaldaron vs a Mummy) (final few rounds of a fight from a while back), shows energy drain negating the life drain of the mummy and significantly reducing its danger factor, (Demitri in the Cave of Many Paths), posted by Rathan, has the Life Draining Demitri easily beating his way through the final encounter after picking up Life Drain.

I agree that its probably better if necessary to patch the game from the ground up, than to slap on patches here and there.

The only really major issure I've encountered is that a DT makes you almost unkillable, DT and run and your safe. Short of having a tremendous amount of Chi (enough to shove every single other creature in the encounter) there is no way to duplicate this.

 

[Wicht]

ouch - I hadn't realized that - of course speaking as an evil DM - one could always have the undead PC meet a couple holy warriors - each with the holy battery charged enough to use holy light

- one fix might also be to have life drain not work against undead.
- the unholy warrior power, steal life, could also be changed to not affect undead (something I was going to do when the rules were rewritten)
- And sounds like the holy warriors should be given some power to counteract steal life and life drain - any ideas?

 

[graydoom]

Making Steal Life unable to affect undead will just make normal unholy warriors even more overpowered by undead .

And I was concerned about this a long time ago, but nobody listened . I said that the drain powers would be far too good because all the prerequistes are good and the powers themselves are amazing. Bah freaking humbug .

[Edit]
And Holy Warriors already have a power to counteract Steal Life. Two of them, in fact, called called Gain Life and Share Life, which counteract Steal LIfe at equal Chi/Ki amounts.

 

[Kalanyr]

I'm trying to come up with a viable holy path somewhat like the Undead Path, but the problem is mirroring the path in power, leads to a ridiculous amount of power on the Holy Side and the quicker death of many more monsters.

Steal Life and Heal Self/Heal Another are balanced in theory, the catch is (as far as I can tell) that Steal Life can be used when both sides are at full health or any other health value, Heal Self/Other relies on your side being wounded before its of use, perhaps if it could take you above your maximum hits? But no more than 5 over.

Edit - I'll add in that making Undead immune to (Poison Blade,Steal Life,Life Draing) just further ups the power of the PC that takes it, granting them immunity to even more powers.

 

[graydoom]

However, Holy Warriors also have Share Life, which has no chance of failure for the same cost. In a party, Holy Warriors easily counteract Steal Life.

My opinion when I first raised this issue a couple months ago was that the drain powers shouldn't exist. Or at least should be epic powers, given how amazingly good they are. Too late now.

[Edit]
Either way, I've been thinking of taking Undead . It doesn't really fit Kalath, but the power advantage is so much that not doing it is really costly .

 

[Wicht]

Making Steal Life unable to affect undead will just make normal unholy warriors even more overpowered by undead .

I am not sure Kalath is overpowered by much of anything - but if unholy warriors were to have a weakness I would pick undead - but it was just a suggestion

And yeah - you were right - the drain powers are too much as is - either they should be an NPC only power or they should be fixed at some point.

Perhaps what we should be doing (and I am more or less doing this mentally) is making suggestions as we go along about a way to better balance some of the powers.

 

[Wicht]

Steal Life and Heal Self/Heal Another are balanced in theory, the catch is (as far as I can tell) that Steal Life can be used when both sides are at full health or any other health value, Heal Self/Other relies on your side being wounded before its of use, perhaps if it could take you above your maximum hits? But no more than 5 over.

You know - I have been trying to figure out why steal life was more powerful because it does seem balanced in theory - but you are right - its because the one requires you to be wounded - perhaps holy warriors should gain a non-healing buff power that allows them to create a holy armor using their battery - the armor taking the hits first.