» Mon Sep 13, 2010 8:16 pm This is not meant to make all classes/specialisations/races the same but to make them equally viable and also tone down these hardcoe hybrid classes.
Comparison 1:
High end Chars
Watching this one, the Warrior and Mage Races are waaay superior to the thief type races.
-Warriors got a huge pool of hitpoints, nice def or atk boosts and resistances
-Mages got a huge Manapool
-Thieves got what? in some cases actives which can be easily replaced by a spell OR are just absolutely [censored] useless when you got a sword big enough.
As everything can be learned, high end bretons, altmer, nord, redguards and orcs will be superior to Kajiit for Example.
Comparison 2:
Purist Classes
-Pure Mages can be played with ease. Illusion spells for persuasion purposes, shields to make up for a lack of armor, destruction to kill stuff, feather and open to make it easier to get much cash from raiding some tombs.
-Pure Thieves are also handy and playable. Lockpicking speaks for itself, sneaking and sniping makes up for the lack of defensive abilities and healing and acrobatics enables you to reach stuff and escape out of combat. They also got access to merchantile and speechcraft which makes it easy to avoid having to use weapons in some quests.
-Pure Warriors need to resort to open or lockpick stuffs to get along, illusion or speechcraft for persuasion purposes and either rest a lot or use potions/healspells when being up vs strong opponents as they got no way of avoiding direct confrontation or snipe from a distance
--> pure mages and thieves are playable, pure warriors
Comparison 3:
Attributes
-A high Endurance value very early will have heavy impact on the game later on.
-Intelligence, Agility etc. will have the same effect for every character type (when using character unspecific stuff) with the exception of intelligence in morrowind which will have a bigger value to specialized mages as it will give them more mana as, says, to a warrior orc.
-on a sidenote, Chosing Luck as Main Attribute will give you a boost which is hardly doable with normal levelups as it means giving up on some serious attrubute ups.
Borderline, No matter, what race you play and what char you got, always go max endurance first and skill luck at char creation!
Comparison 4:
Benefits early on
-Mages will usually have no problems just oneshotting everything after purchasing some spells, which will get harder later on though. Even though, they are slow and weak, they can still carry pretty much loot and get to places fast as they got no armor to carry.
-Warriors will have some problems due to the fact of having to charge in while not having that much of a lifepoints buffer as they have later on, when they got some levels. Also, the armor and weaponry is kinda expensive and heavy, considerably lowering the amount of stuff, you can loot. On the other hand, with some cautious playing, they can overpower everything as in a 1v1 battle, they will have the upper hand, no matter what.
-Thieves will usually have one thing: A lot of cash to spend! Not being heavily encumbered by armor and being able to soften up opponents with range/sneak attacks in before engaging the opponent in direct combat, they can usually finish off opponents quickly and carry a whole load of loot while also being able to get more cash for the loot(ignoring some engine bugs which make you actually get less cash)
Also, they will be the only ones able to pick hard locks that early in the game.
--> Sounds pretty balanced, though, I'd probably give the edge to the mages.
Comparison 5:
Benefits later on
-Mages will usually get problems with the increasing presence of reflection and absorption effects. Also, they will rely on spammingdefensive spells and using potions like crazy.
-Warriors will just go juggernaut and rip everything to shreds. No big downsides, they are warriors for the reason of excelling good at combat. However, they will lack multihit possibilities of mages.
-Thieves will be capable of onehitting small stuff and getting ripped apart by really strong opponents. They will need to rely on some warrior or mage skills at some point.
I didn't count in the possibility of doing hybrid chars or alchemy for thieves. I also tryed to make it not to be based on any game and just talking in general about the concepts in most TES games.
Just wanted to hear some suggestions to tweak some of that stuff in order for it to be slightly more even and balanced. For example, I don't wanna create an argonian cause i want to have the challenge of playing one of the weakest races, I wanna play him for roleplaying and using some unique stuff.
