Sneaking could be made cheaper AP-wise... but if it was cheap enough for rogues to be able to reliably use it to escape attention in combat (by hiding behind something and going Sneak), it may end up overpowered for crossbow snipers as a way to boost damage.... maybe I could change Guerrilla to significantly drop the AP cost of sneaking, but NOT grant a damage boost to sneak attacks. Gives Assassinate more of a role (since it gets a sneaking damage boost). And isn't horribly OP since Assassinate (Snipe) has a cooldown.

On that note, this mod has one or two minor issues stemming from my having not yet touched the Localization files. The Strength, Intelligence, and Finesse descriptions should reflect the extra bonuses.... and if I changed Guerrilla as described above I would need to change its description.

Aero skills could be adjusted to suit the intended "single target massive magic damage" role. There are currently some Aero skills that do too much group damage to suit this role. Dazing Bolt could be made a single-target attack, Blinding Radiance could have its damage reduced if it's too much, Pressure Spike could... do less damage, but inflict Suffocating on everyone in the radius...? Not sure what to do about Superconducter and the source skills...... Maybe I should just revert the increase to Aero damage, maybe Aero is actually fine. I was under the maybe mistaken impression that Aero was too weak.

todo for next patch:
- DONE: Increase cooldown of All In (and maybe decrease the cooldown of Sucker Punch. Check on it.)

- DONE: Make Guerrilla drop the sneak AP cost to 1, but NOT grant a damage boost to sneak attacks.

- DONE: Revert Aero's damage bonus per point to 5%

- DONE: Update English localization, finally, since certain info boxes are now inaccurate. Like the tooltips for primary attributes (which now have secondary bonuses). Or the tooltip for Sucker Punch (which mentions knocking down), or the tooltip for All In (which doesn't mention knocking down.. in the description, anyway), or the tooltip for Flurry (which doesn't explicitly mention the above-average damage), or the tooltip for Geomancer (which mentions earth damage), or the tooltip for Hydrosophist (which mentions water damage).

- DONE: Revert Bows to being Finesse-based. Revert bow potential stat bonus to be +1 Finesse instead of +1 Strength.

- DONE: Try making one-handed swords finesse-based. (And update all 1h-sword-wielding NPCs to have higher Finesse.) Since swords, axes, and maces are all very similar, and since Finesse lacks a comparable weapon (with daggers doing less damage), this'll open up interesting builds like Sword+Bow, Finesse Sword+Board (with higher dodge and finesse "balanced" armor), Finesse Dual Swords (again, higher dodge, finesse armor), and Finesse One-Handed Sword (duelist). Maybe also Finesse Dagger+Sword..? Probably not very viable.

- DONE: Make One-Handed Sword potential stat bonus +1 Finesse

- DONE: Maaaaybe make maces (1h and 2h) do piercing damage, but below-average dmg/ap.

- DONE: Keep _NPCSword (NPC one-handed swords) Strength-based so their stats still make sense.

- DONE: Give high-Geomancer and high-Hydrosophist NPCs high warfare so their "earth" and "water" skills do better damage

- DONE: Lower the crit multiplier for all weapons to make critbuilds and lucky crits less utterly devastating. Ponder whether this nerf to backstabs completely ruins Rogues, or whether they'll still get by fantastically thanks to solid damage and great dodge chance. Yeah... probably.

- DONE (Beta): Brush up the AI. The devs gave the AI tons of potential to be smart, and then told them to act dumb. I'll tell em to act smarter.
- Group up less (to avoid AOE damage)
- Stay further away from explosive barrels
- Most importantly, PREFER to gang up on a target instead of preferring NOT to. It's idiotic that they don't prefer to gang up. (I'll need to make the preference to gang up stronger than the preference to not generally group up
- To prevent Opportunist cheese, AI shouldn't ever decide to "fall back" (especially rangers, who are the main users of the "fall back" behavior.) Rangers would be better off using all their AP on attacking anyway, instead of getting themselves opportunist'd and wasting AP on movement, and then only attacking once.
- To further prevent opportunist cheese, get Melee Archetypes to NOT prefer to switch targets constantly. Once again, that's completely idiotic, they divide their damage up inefficiently and get themselves Opportunist'd.
- Check for other things that might lead to overly-cheap Opportunist or wasted damage.
- ♥♥♥♥♥♥ AI in any other ways you see.

Potential change / experimental ideas:

- Decrease movespeed (distance/AP in combat) across the board, AND increase the cost of self-teleports from 1AP to at least 2 if not 3. Makes positioning more significant when you can't just freely move all over the board.

- Change Aero skills' AP cost and damage to make Aero sort of the "crossbow of magic," with very high skill costs (3, and even 4) across the board, but very high damage.

todo:
- DONE: Give Malady a 313% HP buff so she tanks as well as before on the Vengeance fight where you defend her. Wonder if this'll make any other scene strange. Isn't there a weird Arena scene where you fight a fake version of her? Hmmmmmm.............. I wonder if this'll require a seriously in-depth change instead of an easy one.
- DONE: Change Finesse's dodge bonus from 2% to 1%
- NOT DOING (Still unsure): Revert Maces back to physical instead of pierce...? I fought some zombies that perhaps hit too hard (their damage is based on maces and a single zombie starting a turn nearby was able to nearly one-shot a player character), but I WAS able to beat them on the third try, so let's say it's fine for now.
- DONE: Fix Radeka's Thorn so it deals physical instead of water... how'd that even slip through? Is it implemented differently?
- DONE make frost/rock runes give something other than water/earth resistance when placed in armor

AI notes:
- rangers/mages still opting to retreat-and-get-themselves-opportunist'd
- enemy teleport isn't a touch spell the way player teleport is...

Single-handed's new special ability (Throwing Knife) may be overly-superior to the original Throwing Knife (now named "Void Dagger"). It IS literally a superior skill (slightly higher damage), but it's still worse than a regular attack for damage so either way it's a situational tool, and it REQUIRES being in single-handed while Void Dagger can be used while dual-wielding... so it's not terrible.. but...

Possible Void Dagger changes to make it distinct (all of these changes together):
- Make it usable without a dagger equipped (since it seems like it summons a magic dagger)
- Cost: 1AP always.
- Make the damage NOT based on what weapon you have equipped. Basically just a weapon in itself (with the damage scaling with the stat associated with whatever weapon you have equipped.)
- Make sure that Void Dagger while dual-wielding doesn't hit twice. I'm not sure if it does....
- Make the damage high (and it can still backstab), but make the damage Magic-type, meaning it just destroys magic armor and can't hurt vitality. This is consistent with some other magic-armor-destroying skills Scoundrel has (Chloroform, Gag Order), and means Scoundrels can set up mages to CC. It works pretty well with the crazy flashy visual effects since the knife seems to explode in a cloud of mystical smoke on impact. So it's a magic dagger, perhaps without a true physical form.

More tools to destroy magic armor are probably desperately needed since right now, for example, the only way to Freeze someone is to hit them with air or poison attacks to deplete their magic armor, THEN hit them with an icicle attack. I do like making hard CC more difficult to do in that way, but... there SHOULD be more tools for setting up CC.

a mage with one point in scoundrel WILL be able to use that skill, and it WILL scale with intelligence if the mage has a wand or staff equipped, so it can be a direct tool.

AI notes:
- Just saw a zombie attack one person, then walk a few feet and attack another person. So Melee archetypes may have the same preference to attack-and-then-switch-targets as before, if not an even stronger preference. Gotta fix that.

bug(?)note: possibly some totems (water and...... poison??, maybe others?) are using the new throwing-knife effects (whirlwind sound plus tiny knife projectile). Which is bizarre, since as far as I know those are all only bound to the Sucker Punch attack, and wouldn't overwrite anything from the original game..... either the totem attack is somehow tied to Sucker Punch (unlikely) or my changes overwrote the Totem firing effect........ or I somehow applied the new effects to totems without realizing...

edit: fixed. It was actually that they were casting Throwing Knife because, unlike Sucker Punch, it hadn't been flagged as "AI can't use this."

note: I need to update the descriptions of the ice attacks that I made no longer create ice surfaces. (Was that even a good idea? Ehh.. maybe.)

also: give incarnates Pawn, probably.

another thing to investigate: adjusting Lone Wolf's stats so that it's more of a "You wanna be a badass Hybrid instead of a complementary team?" deal than a "You wanna be a god?" deal.

However, giving enough stat points to allow you to play Hybrid means giving enough stat points to allow you to hyper-specialize even harder.. but if I reduce the pure stat boosts then maybe I can at least make it more balanced.

If possible, Lone Wolf should get more Civil points, but it probably isn't possible without scripting...

...yeah, all that's defined in Data.txt is this:

key "LoneWolfMaxAPBonus","2"

key "LoneWolfAPBonus","2"

key "LoneWolfMagicArmorBoostPercentage","30"

key "LoneWolfArmorBoostPercentage","30"

key "LoneWolfVitalityBoostPercentage","30"

I've already noticed just from the numbers in-game that, even in the vanilla game, the boosts that are supposed to be 30% are more like 60%. (And the boosts that Summons get from the Summoner's skill are 10% instead of 5%).

More bizarrely, for that last one, is that this is in the original Data file:

key "SkillAbilitySummonsStatsPerPoint","4"

4???

Oh wait there's also this:

key "SummoningAbilityBonus","5"

So the first one must apply to something else. Odd that these values are getting doubled, though.

So Lone Wolf. Shame I can't reduce the bonuses to attribute or skill points from here (wonder where I CAN change them... if anywhere). If I simply removed the boosts to vitality and armors, maybe it'd be pretty balanced still just from the doubled stats. Lone Wolves can hit REALLY hard thanks to very fast growing, say.. Warfare + Strength.

to investigate, maybe as a separate mod...?:
- Lower movement per AP.
- Reduced damage on Bows rather significantly, both to stop their current dominance and to prevent their increased dominance from everyone having slower movement.
- Lower AP per turn for everyone. Like... even as low as 2AP. (And lower max AP too, to prevent stockpiling.)
- Increase cost of self-teleports to at least 2AP instead of 1AP.

The idea behind the Lower AP Per Turn and lower movement per AP is that instead of everyone getting potentially massive turns where they can move wherever and cast some stuff, the turns are more... incremental. Meaning you can see someone trying to move somewhere, and you can move to head him off. Basically everything gets a little more "simultaneous" and a little less "everyone's frozen while one guy moves all over."

This would also necessitate:
- doubling all cooldowns
- doubling all status durations
- fixing any cases where number of turns is tied to something else via scripting, like, idk, Defend Malady for X Turns.

idea: Fix Summoning so it's properly a 5% boost per level instead of a 10% boost, then increase the MaxSummons for players to at least 2.

idea: Re-enable the disabled feature: Warfare adding damage-to-physical-armor instead of increasing ALL damage. Someone who stacks Warfare would then be great at destroying physical armor, but bad at destroying vitality. People who want to maximize total damage would have to specialize in weapon skills, and would still end up with less damage.

Is it a good idea? No idea, really... honestly I need to take a break from developing this mod to focus on other things in my life, like work! And.... another mod (for a totally different game) I help develop! (Movie Battles 2 for Jedi Academy.)