Gaining willpower is too easy

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
1

A lot of the perks that are currently in the game are OP in part because its so easy to gain/regain WPs.

I thought originally that the idea of will power was that the player would have a decision to make in whether or not to spend those WPs on perks in order to boost abilities and what not, but that this would come at the cost of lowering their Will for the remainder of that mission. That would have presented the player with a genuinely interesting dilemma.

However as it stands, being able to gain additional WPs so easily via rally the troops, killing enemies, and special map tiles means that spending WPs is a no-brainer, especially in the situations where you know that you’ll get those WPs straight back.

What I’d propose firstly is that whenever WPs are spent that both the current, and also maximum WPs of a soldier are lowered. So you start of with 8WPs, spend 2WPs to use an ability and now have 6WPs, but the maximum that you can top back up to is now 7WPs.

For Rally the Troops, I think you absolutely need to make the cost of using this skills be higher than the WPs that can be given via it. If it costs X amount of WPs to use, then that should be per solider that you’re boosting, and that amount of WP boost should be a percentage of the WP boost given.

For killing enemies, I don’t think this should give any boost to WP at all, unless maybe that solider has a passive skill that allows for it. Likewise, I don’t think it should lead to panic in enemies that have high WP to begin with, and/or aren’t within an immediate range of that enemy being killed.

For WP boosts on the map, I actually think this is quite good, as it gives a strategic objective for the player to move towards… maps should be larger/longer and dash should be nerfed in order to make these points harder to reach, the distance between them needs to be further than a single solider can move in a single turn.

Beyond that, I think you could also give solider’s an additional WP penalty at the start of maps that is based on their current level of stamina. Again a passive perk could exist to negate this.

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2

Rally the troops at the moment gives a single AP to each soldier in the squad except the caster, no WPs, and it costs 2 AP and 4 WP and can only be used once a turn by each soldier that has it.

The exploit from this skill at the moment comes from having 3+ soldiers with this ability in a squad, because you are leveraging 6APs+ to get, in an 8 soldier squad, 21 APs back, which is basically like 5 soldiers getting a whole turn back… And if you bring 7 soldiers with rally the troops, it’s 49 APs back, which is more than the APs your squad started the turn with :crazy_face:.

But note that raising the WP cost for each soldier won’t really solve this problem, because each would use RtT only once.

The same thing happens with rage burst at the moment, because it’s a one shot killer, see the discussion here So... Rage Burst can no longer cover multiple targets most agreed that it should cost more WPs to use and some that it should drain any WPs leftover and all the APs from next turn, in addition to nerfing the damage output either by limiting the number of shots fired to 3-4, or drastically reducing accuracy. Ah, and @MichaelIgnotus and me really want the sweep back in RB with AW, which is basically the most important take away on fixing RB :blush:

And this is the biggest problem I see with curbing exploits by tweaking WP cost, or recovery rate: it doesn’t eliminate many exploits, while it nerfs non exploitive uses of the skills.

To bring another example: mindcrash. A squad of priests with jetpacks and inspire. Mindcrash has 0 AP 6 WP cost. Using a jetpack and 2 mindcrashes (and give them a frenzy first so they can really move around): 15 WP and 3 AP for 200 damage ignoring armor to every opponent in 10 tile range. So square the cost of the second mindcrash to make it absolutely prohibitive: I don’t care, I have a squad of these guys. And every time they kill something, 1 WP back to everyone, to use on other abilities.

Bottomline: I think the solution is to address each skill as an exploit using it is discovered. E.g. RtT: limit uses per squad to 2. Mindcrash make WPs of opponents act as defense or give it diminishing returns. Discussed here Priest weapon exploit (this game just become much easier) - #6 by pantolomin Stealth https://forums.snapshotgames.com/t/lets-fix-stealth/8511RB, etc.

EDIT: typos

3

Absolutely agree with all of that, with one additional and very important caveat.

Most of these skill combos become exploitable because there is no limit to the number of times they can be used or received during a turn. So the classic Dashing Assault with Shotgun & Rapid Fire combo, or the Jet-Jumping Heavy with a backup squad of Rallyers can wipe a map in one turn simply because they never stop!

The universal fix to this is simple - limit the benefit of ALL Skills (including being a passive recipient) to 1 use per turn. They’re still useful - they’re still ‘get out of jail free’ or ‘take that bitch!’ cards that can be stacked to give each squaddie that extra little boost that is the difference between life or death on any given turn. But the crucial thing is, if you can only Dash + Rapid Fire in the Face + Rally only once per turn, you can’t serially bounce right across the board, taking out every single enemy on Turn 1, as I have seen some people do in videos posted on this site.

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It would fix RtT, but not RB and not mind crush. There are different problems that require different solutions. Some skills need to have squad limits (like RtT), some skills need to have limited uses for each soldier (like you suggest, e.g. dash though I would set the limit at 2 or 3, not 1), some skills just need specific fixes (RB, stealth, mindcrash).

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What we should keep in mind that reducing the ability of gaining WP and AP should only be done when there is a whole balancing of the game. I mean that is not purposeful only reduce the soldiers abilities and not OP enemies and gameplay.
Currently you need 1st turn death of a scylla when you are in a citadel with two Bomb chiron. You cant hide you cant run. You must Kill the scylla or load the Mission Again ans prey for other enemies.
I agree with you, all OP issues must be fixed. But there must always be something you can do against OP enemy Situation. The game must be fair for human and machine :slight_smile:

6

Absolutely agree - It all has to be balanced in unison.

7

Sure, I assume that difficulty has to be adjusted to the gameplay.

8

Sigh> I get so tired of repeating this that I think I’m just going to ignore it from now on after saying it one more time:

We all - myself, Spite, Voland, Zzzz, Yokes, Lorifel - who post obsessively on these forums almost every day, have said more times than I can count that the first thing that needs to be done is get the balance right. I think by now that is a given to everyone.

As Spite put it above, it all has to be balanced in unison - which is why I suspect it’s taking Snapshot so long to bring out the next big patch, because to be frank, it’s a huge job.

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9

Looks like Michael is speaking for me, well ok fine. :slight_smile:

I believes that the difficulty is largely disturbed by current auto scaling and I doubt all side effects was expected. It makes very hard to pinpoint what’s an OP hole and what’s not.

Apply a comparison with other games doesn’t work, that it would be an OP hole in XCOM doesn’t mean anything.

A second aspect even if Im’ sure the dev is focused on offering difficulties for various difficulty levels, it’s also very clear that the design is focus on the diversity of choices, also to make play a turn a lot more complex.

I’d say there’s two points I don’t see how they can’t be an OP hole anyway without huge rules change or some cap:

  • Stealing 100% and a cap at 85% should work well enough.
  • Adrenalin Rush and Rapid Clearance combined. If they can be combined one probably need a cap. The most obvious target is Rapid Clearance, damage penalty for each consecutive kill (copy/paste idea borrowed to XCOM2/LW2).

And two other points but less obvious for me:

  • I’m less sure Rapid Clearance plus a team with Rally will be a problem, but the RC nerf suggested above should do the trick.
  • I’m also less sure that Sniper Rifle and Rage Burst will be a problem, but eventually setup a range limit forced with Rage Burst could target a possible future problem.

But gain willpower is dependent of so many elements that I don’t see how consider it OP currently.

Not simplify a turn play seems important for the current design spirit. Those changes will also simplify play a turn by removing elements to consider or by simplifying their effect:

  • Less WP is less special actions, simplification.
  • Remove map points giving WP is removing an element to consider, simpfification.
  • Remove WP gained from a kill is is removing an element to consider, simplification.
  • Remove Inspire targeting whole party and target only one soldier is smplifying an element to consider, simplification.

If all those changes aren’t simplification it’s just if they make it too easy, but this is a lot a matter of tuning better the difficulty levels and the auto scaling.

10

Gotta say i absolute hate this idea, at least unless they redesign priests to no longer use will points. Right now you mind control a target and spend your will points… Lets say your priest starts with 12, the target is at 6. Now suddenly you have a lower cap, but also lowers each turn because of the recurring cost… Few turns and your priest has zero possible will and stays panicked.

Kind of been thinking something along this line myself. I’ve been wondering if a setup here the one who gets the kill gains no will from the kill but instead boosts either the whole team by 1 or just those who had eyes on the target. Gotta be a bit inspiring to see the pandoran scum going down. Perhaps some perk unique to one of the classes could bump that up to two for the team(or those who can see the target go down) per kill, but again not to the one doing the kill.

Another idea might be to instead count each use of dash as the mission taking an extra turn. Use it 4 times in one battle and you’re 4 turns closer to that soldier being rather exhausted… Too much dashing about leaves a soldier so exhausted it’s time to head back to base and swap them out, yet still leaves the ability as a tactical choice… Do i have my best assault rush across the map to save a few civilians or risk losing the civilians so my soldier is ready for my teams retaliation on the nearby pandoran nest?

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Why wouldn’t it only lower once? - You’re not replying the skill each turn to keep mind control are you? Max will would just lower to 11 and you’d mind control from there as normal.

I think that you’d then leave the player just rotating one solider in that could dash for another one? Not to say that perks shouldn’t also drain stamina, but it doesn’t fix the issue so much as creates the need for a bigger roster.

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Well in the bit i quoted you said “whenever will points were spent” and to me that implied any form of spending them, including recurring cost. A one time thing per use… that might work. Though it’d still be an issue for priests as the enemies get inflated stats (still thinking of a 32 will triton i encountered a while back).

Yes that was the idea… a rotating roster if the player chooses to build their team (and strategic bases) to abuse something like 4 dashes per turn in one mission to utterly exhaust that one assault. Both a tactical and strategic choice involved in that move, as they’d either have to plan on the downtime or have the roster to continually swap those out. To me it would make sense, if you cover 4 turns worth of your movement in one turn (using dash) that’s 4 times as exhausting as simply moving your full movement in one turn. It’d give folks the option if they want it, though they have to plan both strategically and tactically to be worth it.

13

Don’t. If they don’t fix the 32-WP Triton problem first - ie. if they don’t address the DDA balancing issues, then everything we say on these forums is null and void - and by this point everyone should know that.

So stop arguing that we shouldn’t balance OP Squad skills cos the Crabbies are too OP. We know that. Still doesn’t stop Squaad skills from being OP and needing a balancing pass, though.

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Seeing as the only way to deal with the highest difficulty in the game is through expert use of will power and perks i say no.