Hi there, Antistone. I'm quite fond of your hero maker for the dual reason that it allows to create pretty interesting characters and it also serves as a "standard" to evaluate the "power" of existing or custom characters.

If it's not too bothersome to you, I'd really like to know how would you "measure" the following abilities.

Defender Level 2

Defender Level 3

Healer Level 1

Healer Level 3

Soldier Level 3

-1 Fatigue

-1 Speed

Fly ability.

Kel - Ignore other figures and obstacles when drawing LOS (you already have a Perk negating Shadowcloak, if I remember correctly)

Jonas 1 - Equipment is indestructible. Jonas 2 - Enemies left with 1 wound surrender ignoring Undying.

Haggletooth - When declaring Battle action, may switch out both attacks for 1 with Sweep.

Gherinn - Before rolling for an attack spend 1 fatigue to make it Aimed.

Challara - Brightblaze Familiar: movement 4, once per area Magic Breath attack with White+Green, negates armor.

Hugo - Cannot spend Fatigue for movement.

Krutzbeck - +2 damage and +2 Armor when having 4HP or less.

Lindel - once per area discard a skill to draw a new one of the same type.

Tatianna - once per area at start of overlord's turn get back to town automatically.

Tobin - add distance to target to the damage inflicted. Cannot make ranged against adjacent targets.

Nanok - no armor, but +1Armor per trait dice.

I'd be really grateful if you could evaluate the BPs for at least a few of these abilities, since I'm really into statistics and your editor works as a pretty nice tool to me to make characters.

On a final note: You allow two perks with Zyla's Ghost ability...you know you put Shadowcloak among perks...and you're fully aware what a character with BOTH Ghost and Shadowcloak is (even with -1Armor)...I believe Shaodowcloak is strong enough to be an ability and not a perk. But that's just my opinion.

Thanks.

Elric of Melniboné said:

Whether things got made into abilities or perks is based mostly on the length of the required text - perks need to fit onto a single line to make sure that the total ability text doesn't overrun the box. There are a lot of perks that are more powerful than a lot of abilities, and that's reflected by their cost. Though I did make some short effects into abilities just because they seemed very character-defining...

The only synergy between Ghost and Shadowcloak is that, combined, they block Reach attacks (Giants, Trolls, Wendigoes). Ghost alone already blocks all other melee attacks (Beastmen, Razorwings, Ogres, Kobolds, Ferrox, Golems, Blood Apes, Dark Elves), and does absolutely nothing to ranged and magic attacks, either alone or in combination with Shadowcloak . It's certainly possible that either or both of Ghost or Shadowcloak are priced incorrectly in my editor, but the synergy effect doesn't strike me as especially stronger or different in nature than what Ghost does on its own, so I doubt it's worth worrying much about. I can't possibly prevent all synergies between abilities and perks.

Though I would also argue that Ghost is a badly-designed ability that probably shouldn't exist at all, because it usually matters very little but occasionally makes a giant difference, and it doesn't seem to make even a tiny bit of thematic sense. So I probably wouldn't have included it as an option at all except that I was trying to include the abilities of published heroes as much as possible as benchmarks and for completeness. In The Enduring Evil , I let Shades and Zyla have Disruption instead of Ghost ...which actually synergizes much better with Shadowcloak .

Elric of Melniboné said:

Raw stat changes are not abilities. If you're going to include these at all, it makes more sense to simply add extra rows to the beginning of the fatigue and speed cost tables on the Parameters sheet, then increase the BP limit by whatever you decide it costs to buy back up to the old starting value (note: you can't just use a negative BP cost for the starting value, the cost of the very first row in that table is ignored).

But the reason I choose the starting values that I did is that I don't think the normal approximations really apply below that point.

A hero that only gets 4 movement points (or less) on a Run action is going to have a seriously hard time keeping up with the party without some other shenanigans. Your speed doesn't do anything at all unless you devote a half-action to using it, and at that point the opportunity cost starts looming very high even when you really need movement points. A hero with only 1 or 2 speed is probably not going to perform movement half-actions at all unless he's very desperate, which means that his exact speed barely even matters, and giving him more BP in exchange for a stat that he doesn't actually use would be inappropriate.

Even a hero with exactly 2 fatigue is going to be trying to rely very little on fatigue, and I'm not sure if I would've allowed that if not for Okaluk & Rakash, but at 1 fatigue, a vitality potion basically only give you back what it costs to drink it. Any player that drops fatigue below 2 is planning on ignoring his fatigue stat, so again, what he's giving up is negligible (to him) and so should be worth little or no BP. There are also several skills that require 2 fatigue to activate, so dropping your fatigue below that makes those skills unusable to that hero, which gets messy.

You can take the pattern of BP costs for fatigue and speed on the Parameters sheet and continue it lower if you really want, but I advise against it.

Elric of Melniboné said:

When I asked forumers to rank the abilities of published heroes, several people put Zyla's (which is primarily Fly ) in a category by herself above everything else. This is the sort of ability that's fairly quest-dependent and can dramatically change the tactics of the party as a whole; letting a hero just pick it off a list could be dangerous.

But if I was going to price it, I'd probably need to put it somewhere above the highest-priced abilities of published heroes (based on the aforementioned discussion thread). Landrec's at 80 (for a magic-primary), Tahlia's at 90, so Fly would probably be around 100-125.

Which, coincidentally, is also right about what it would need to cost to put Zyla at the very top of the price list for official heroes...though that's kind of complicated, since I suspect that 1-conquest heroes are currently underpriced in the editor.

Another way of looking at it is that Fly is better than Acrobat, which is considered to be one of the best skills. A random starting skill costs about 40-50 BP, and the Perfect Skill ability lets you choose exactly the skill you want for an additional 50 BP, so you could make a hero that always starts with Acrobat and they'd pay close to 100 BP for that priviledge (and they'd need to have ranged as their primary trait). So Fly should cost more than that.

Elric of Melniboné said:

Looks like the benefit is roughly linear to me; you can probably just charge BP proportional to the amount of healing for any values in a reasonable range.

Elric of Melniboné said:

Hm...on reflection, Defender 1 may be significantly underpriced. I didn't spend a long time on the build-your-own-hero abilities, and haven't play-tested any of them; I think I may have put it at 40 just because the only person who rated it in the discussion thread put it at 3/5, and that's the approximate price I used for most abilities rated at 3/5.

-1 damage against a hero is marginally better than +1 armor (can't be negated by Pierce), and +1 armor is generally worth at least 50 BP (around 25 for the stat increase, plus around 25 to negate the conquest increase of ~0.5 that usually comes with it). Monsters more than 3 spaces away get to ignore it, but it also provides significant protection to allies - bonuses to the entire party add up fast .

Lowering range of nearby monsters isn't generally a big deal, but for a few monsters (e.g. Bane Spiders) it really is, and range penalties, like armor, provide rapidly escalating returns. (In Enduring Evil , I've noticed that one rank of Deflection is almost worthless, but the 2nd and later ranks have a very noticeable effect.)

If I were to reprice them on the spot, maybe:

Defender 1: 60 BP, +0.3 Conquest
Defender 2: 90 BP, +0.4 Conquest
Defender 3: 130 BP, +0.5 Conquest

Yes, that's a big change from the current price for Defender 1. And it's quite possible I'm wrong, having not played with it. But if you're positioned well, I think that radius effect could eat up quite a lot of monsters' damage output, especially from melee monsters.

Elric of Melniboné said:

Nanok, like One Fist, has an ability whose value is VERY strongly dependent on the rest of the hero's attributes, and also changes in value very easily based on the treasure level heroes are fighting at. I excluded them specifically because I don't think I can price them fairly. What, did you think I just forgot them when I was pricing the abilities of all the other FFG heroes?

Elric of Melniboné said:

I haven't played with any of the promo heroes, but I think the general forum consensus on these was that they were game-breaking and shouldn't be used at all.

Elric of Melniboné said:

I'm not touching the balance considerations of Crushing Blow with a 10-foot pole; I think it probably shouldn't exist and I don't have a clue how FFG intended it to be balanced. The other part is basically a hyper-complicated combination of bonus damage and ignoring Undying, which are both already in the editor.

Elric of Melniboné said:

I made a philosophical decision not to include a list of disadvantages that could be taken for extra BP - some abilities and perks have a downside, but none of them have a negative cost (except High Conquest Bias, which has a true cost of zero when you factor in the conquest change, and which I was thinking of removing anyway).

Disadvantages are hard to price, because they tend to be more dependent on the hero's other strengths, and letting players stack them up is almost always a quick way to completely break a point-buy system. They'd also probably interact very poorly with the random hero generator portion of the spreadsheet.

I suspect that being unable to spend fatigue for movement is a very serious disadvantage, though. That's usually what I spend 95% of my fatigue on.

Elric of Melniboné said:

That's a marginally worse version of Whirlwind (row 105, 50 BP for melee heroes). Maybe dicount it 5 BP or something if you're really worried about it.

Elric of Melniboné said:

I believe Gherinn sacrifices 1 wound, rather than spending 1 fatigue. The spend 1 fatigue version is marginally better than Focus (row 252, 35 BP). Sacrificing a wound is both better and worse than spending a fatigue, but probably pretty close in value in most cases.

Elric of Melniboné said:

As I said in a thread discussing the new promo heroes, I think that's probably similar in value to the Lucky Skills ability (row 188, 30 BP). Lindel's ability generally gives more total options over the course of a quest, but you have to discard a skill before you see what the alternative is, and you don't get some of the options until the game is partially over.

Elric of Melniboné said:

Highly dependent on the hero's attributes. I dislike this ability, because it looks very swingy and I suspect it's systematically exploitable, but I've got very little idea what it's actual value is.

Elric of Melniboné said:

It's heavily dependent on the quest layout, but in a 4-hero game, Brightblaze can one-shot tier 1 monsters about half the time, so if he can catch about 3 targets in the Breath template that's about 1.5 free kills per area; a free tier 1 kill's worth around 1.2 half-actions (an attack that doesn't roll an X is almost always a kill); and Eagerness gives approximately one free half-action per area, so Challara's ability could perhaps be priced around 55-60 BP.

All of the promo heroes' abilities should become a lot easier to price once everyone's played with them a few times.

As for Brother Gherinn I must have gotten distracted when I posted that one...it's definitely pay 1 wound.

Thank you for your answer, Antistone. I somehow understand Nanok's, One fist's and Krutzbeck's abilities are hard to price since they're very "statline dependant". You didn't anser to Soldier Level 3, though.

I don't believe Kel and Tobin to be so broken they actually "break the game", but I will let you know better once my actual capaign (where I'm facing Kel) is over. Should Tobin ever get to be used, I'll let you know.

I believe Defender is getting a bit overpriced over there. Especially I DON'T believe that level 2 or 3 should go up to more than 100 points. But that's my opinion by the way and the incremental rising of Conquest is very good idea.

By the way, how about adding an ignore Ironskin perk?

Thanks again. With your answers at hand it will be easier to evaulate the power of parties and characters...

Elric of Melniboné said:

Certainly Tobin causes major game changing problems in SoB, with long ranges possible. People report him one-shotting bosses, or enemy ships, at extremely large ranges. Put it this way. A starting hero in my own campaign, with no upgrades and using no feats, can achieve 13 range minimum with a cannon.
Soldier 2 special ability (+2R+2D if adjacent), Keen Sight (+1R+1Damage ignore shadowcloak), Blessing from fellow hero (+1R+1D, who also covers the adjacency requirement for Soldier), +7 Range and Knockback from cannon, BYbb. Now that's a good combo he has going there, but just gives an example of how cheesy Tobin could get - before he upgrades!

In 'normal' (indoor, more limited ranges) conditions he can still easily achieve combat bonuses of +6 to +10 damage. That is just so far outside the range of what 'normal' heroes can get from a special ability that it most certainly puts him in a unique super-powerful class. And his disadvantage is negligible, given that aside from grapple he is never more than a fatigue point from being non-adjacent to his target.

Kel is broken because of what she does to spawning, not attacks. Her attacking is ridiculously powerful as it is, attacking through all obstacles, monsters and other heroes, but it is the spawn prevention aspect that makes herbroken.

The Problem with ignoring Ironskin is it is massively dependent on the Armour trait. At armour 0 it is worth 0. At armour 6-7 it is worth easily more than 100+++. Thus you simply can;t value it easily in a spreadsheet, even if you attach the 'cannot wear armour' penalty to keep it's power lower.

Elric of Melniboné said:

For comparison, 100 BP is about what you would expect for something that gave +1 armor to 2 heroes (since +1 armor normally costs about 25 BP + conquest equivalent to another 25 BP). Radius 6 is pretty big in Descent terms: very little is ever going to attack you from farther away than that, and I suspect you could keep at least one other hero close enough to be thoroughly protected as well. Plus, there's also the range penalty. So I have a hard time seeing how Defender level 2 could be worth any less than 100 BP, and in fact could plausibly be worth a lot more than that in a 4-hero game. Armor bonuses are quite powerful in Descent, and full-party buffs add up really fast.

If you want to try it out, I'd suggest you keep a tally during the game of how many monster attacks are made, and how many are made under the Defender penalty. Maybe even break it down by which hero is being attacked, whether you changed the monster's target to avoid Defender, and whether the range penalty seemed to matter.

I should also note that you probably need to say that if multiple heroes have the ability, they don't stack (that is, a monster is only affected by one Defender variant, no matter how many he's in range of). Otherwise, an entire party of Defenders is probably almost invincible; -4 range will shut down most non-melee attackers even at point-blank, and 2 base armor + chainmail + a -4 damage penalty will negate a max damage roll from a beastman.

That's not unprecedented; there's some other abilities (such as the one that reduces the overlord's hand size) that get stupid really fast if you let them stack. FFG's custom hero rules don't allow duplicate abilities within a party at all. But most abilities don't have any particular problem when multiple heroes take them.

Corbon said:

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. Perhaps you're confusing the ability to bypass Ironskin with the Ironskin ability itself? Though an armor of zero doesn't make either of those worthless...

Ignoring Ironskin is somewhat volatile, but for a different reason: it's a very powerful ability, but only a single type of monster has it (Golems), and that monster is rare, from an expansion, and not really spawnable (there's a treachery spawn, but it's ludicrously overpriced). On top of that, Golems are a very specialized monster, and removing Ironskin kind of defeats the purpose of including them in the quest at all.

It's kind of like being immune to Swallow: that's a big deal, potentially even game-altering...in one room of one quest. And totally irrelevant the rest of the time.

I'm not even sure the editor should offer all of the immunity options that it currently does, but they were an easy way to expand the list of perks, because they can be described very compactly.

To Carbon:

Yeah, I guess Tobin might be pretty devastating in SoB, and pretty otherpowered in Vanilla Dungeons,,but otherwise I believe he's going to have a real hard time adding +6 or +10 damage to monsters, at least inside campaign dungeons (which tend to be quite cramped, at least most of them), besides, you can always cut his LOS with obstacles/figures...and he's still a very slow character (especially since he's probably not going to waste skills on movement boosts.

So long I've been able to spawn even with Kel aroud. Again, playtest is the only answer and I understand that MY playtest isn't the UNIVERSAL answer anyway. I'll keep you informed about how she performs (she's doing well, actually, but I was able to get BIG advantage in the first dungeon of the campaign so the party is really sweating to recover from the bad beating while I was able to upgrade beasts and trap treachery).

As for the Ironskin stuff (as Antistone noticed), you don't seem to have noticed I asked for a "this character's attacks negate Ironskin" thing, not the "this character has ironskin" thing, which is already present, by the way in the form of a satisfying Level 2 Barbarian ability.

To Antistone:

I guess you might have a point on all that you say (still believe Ghost+Shadowcloack stack nicely).

Of course I don't let my players (or myself, when I'm a player) to stack Defender or any other ability (just think about an entire party of Bards, Level2 Tacticians or Healers or even Soldiers...or Barbarians?! All have Ironskin as a default?!). No more than a character per ability is allowed, of course, regardless of the "Level" of the Ability (I wouldn't allow both Ailey and Dognar in a party and would force redrawing of the second draw or I could allow to keep both as characters drawn, but wouldn't allow to choose more than one to be in the party). Actually even an entire party of custom made characters might result overpowered...but luckily, right now custom characters are 28% of my total drawing desk, hence I don't expect more than one or a couple to end up in a party anyway...so long it hasn't happened.

Thanks again for all your contributions!

Elric of Melniboné said:

Err, you don't control his LOS, he does. Between his own movement capability (with MP or fatigue) and the other heroes able to go before or after as necessary it is very, very difficult to inhibit his LOS significantly.
He doesn't need speed. He actively wants to be further away. He is the ultimate hang-at-the-back hero who prevents spawning and takes long range potshots that slaughter things .

Elric of Melniboné said:

How? Is your Kel player not trying? The only thing that monsters can spawn behind from her is walls and doors. Which means, if placed well she will cover substantial amounts of ground, so that only one or two other heroes need think about spawn prevention.

Elric of Melniboné said:

Yep, blew that one completely!

The matter is I don't often use blocks to cover LOS, since in AC you usually have to make use of the walls...that's all. Also, it's true that obstacles don't block her LOS, but if she's in a pit, her LOS is still unexistent (the pit in that case does not "block" los...it's models inside that have reduced LOS, or at least this is how we rule it). I once opened a pit right under her at the end of her movementand got wide spawning range thanks to that. Of course this trick won't work forever, but it's still a nice trick. As for the rest...there are two Gusts of Wind in the deck. They always work fine and I keep them if I expect to have problems with spawning. As for the rest, 12HP and 1 Armor mean I can kill her when I need to...since I'm the Spider Queen I'm often able to kill during the heroes during their own turns, opening wide gaps in their lines for spawning. That's about all there is to it.

Elric of Melniboné said:

I'm inclined to agree with that ruling, for what it's worth. Obstacles don't block Kel's LoS, but being in a pit doesn't block LoS so much as limit its range in the first place. Without wanting to get into a whole hair-splitting thing, I think it's the difference between limiting actual LoS versus limiting overall potential LoS. Besides which, she's cool enough as is.

I would also rule the same for staircases, for example. She can only see the other end and all adjacent spaces, like everyone else. That kind of LoS is defined by the obstacle, it's not simply a case of the obstacle blocking what would otherwise be an uninterrupted line.

Kel was changed in the FAQ (pg 19) to no longer have un-blocked LoS for the purposes of spawning, so it is mainly just for attacks that it matters. This makes her still very good, but not as insane as she was before. Also from pg 5 of the FAQ:

Q: If a hero with the Precision skill is standing in a Pit,
can he choose to ignore the Pit and thus the Line of Sight
effects from being in a Pit when attacking?
A: No.

I think that could then be extrapolated as you said with Truthseeker Kel, she can't "ignore" the pit in order to see out of it.

Kartigan said:

Well!
I've had the 'latest' FAQ marked March 2010 downloaded since March, and it doesn't mention Kel at all. So I looked and apparently I haven't been using the latest FAQ after all!

Nobody is questioning the pit thing AFAIK.

I'm very happy to know Kell was FAQed, both because I'm mastering against it (ihih, my girlfriend won't like it though), and because I like when things get fixed the right way.

She's still a pretty powerful "attack" mage, but not too much better than Landrek and comparable to Astarra, for game overall utility.

A side note on an old tread. I added some abilities to Antistone's editor (Tobin's, Krutzbeck's, Defender Level2 and Level3, Challara's...) just to somehow address points to every character in the game so far, plus all characters I did by the Official Editor. Most promotional characters resulted to be overcosted (both Tobin and Krutzbeck resulted 416BP monsters and all characters using Defender's variants were over 400 BP, using the new costs given by Antistone). I even priced somehow One Fist's ability (and he resulted slightly underpriced, which is reasonable, since he isn't exactly a top tier...).

After I did all that I calculated the average cost of descent characters and guess what?

360,00something!

I just wanted to compliment with Antistone, since it really seems that the average for Descent Characters should be 360 BP! It was very, very well calculated, indeed. That's all.

Elric of Melniboné said:

We've come to expect nothing less...