Melee fighters are lacking BE skills compared to mages, even though we have plenty of animations for them. I imagine they should support critical hits and calculate damage based on attack and defense like normal attacks, and use vitality and sometimes health to be activated.
Really, we cannot make a release when all non-mage fighters have just one basic skill.
Concept Proposal: Add "AP" that will exist just in BE. We will calc it based on constitution, agility, level and traits or vitality as you suggested.
- Normal attack will always be free.
- Other attacks cost these points. We'll add skills to mages that can restore those points for warriors. Maybe mages who do not have combat basetraits should always get 0 of those AP or be maxed out at 1...
Since we have different weapons, these skills should be tied to base attack types. Like, some ranged skill could require BowAttack or ThrowAttack available to be used.
Maybe... that would have to be a new mechanic (yet another new mechanic on top of everything else...). I think those new skills should be bound to weapons... or we can come up with yet another complex system and bind them to classes/weapons combos
In any case, we need to think this through properly to try and come up with something that will stick.
Also an option to add stuff like double attack/triple attack, with simple animations...
We have base attack type in characters jsons that should be used if they are unarmed. Equipping a weapon though should add a basic skill provided by that weapon (like swordattack for a sword) to attacks list, meaning we should carefully handle cases when a character already has swordattack, just like with traits.
Stuff like this usually falls into place as I code the system, but I'll try to keep it in mind (it may work like that already, I don't remember offhand but I'll check it tonight).
Support for absolute values for cost of spells and battle skills, like 50% of max mp, would help to balance powerful high level skills without making them impossibly demanding. This should work in addition to normal cost, to prevent low level mages from using it. Like, cost = 100 abs_cost=50 mean it costs 50% of mp, and these 50% should be at least 100.
I don't like this one
I'd rather put time constraints on super advanced spells (like you need a week of cooldown time after using it). But it's yet another mech...
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I am complaining
We need interesting mechanics like these! That player could feel, work with, try to calculate and that do not require hours of micro but I do not want to do anything to specific without a good deal of discussion anymore because that costs insane amount of coding time, we've been burned by stuff like this too often.