How can weapon and endurance skills be made more viable for the player?

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Totalgarbage

Sergeant Knight
The best builds for the player has been undoubtedly been builds that focused on intelligence, social and cunning since the early access, with intelligence builds being the best. Of course, we don't have to play as optimally as we can, and I find it more fun to focus on RP rather than optimization, but honestly there aren't many reasons to spec our precious attribute points into Vigor, Control or Endurance (okay, I admit Endurance, especially athletics perk 275 and riding perk 225, mounted patrols, are pretty good, and I do love throwing 250, Impale if I RP as a throwing guy).

Skill level 218, the highest possible skill level with the 2 starting attribute points + 5 focus points in any weapon or endurance skill coupled with good equipment (and even skill as low as level 50-100, or even just a swinging polearm on horseback by itself) is good enough for the player to make a significant impact on the battlefield. While the scaling bonuses of the final weapon skill perks can be fun, they don't really make that much difference since we could likely already kill units with one hit much before the final perk with most weapons anyways. What could be done in your opinion (preferably without any nerfs to cunning, social and intelligence skills/perks) to make warrior builds more viable?
 
I always spec into Endurance because of the bonuses in Smithing and Athletics. +2 to Endurance and either Control or Vigor gives a boon. So I think Endurance is fine as is.

For Vigor or Control, the higher level Perks could probably give bonuses to Party Size. The 275 Perk could give you a bonus of +1 to Party Size for every level over 300. So a complete max of the skills gets you +30 to Party Size.

Then you could skip a lot of Steward/INT and not have an issue.
 
I don't know about the best builds, but endurance has always been a priority attribute for me. Up to 4 free attribute points for the cost of a few focus points is a good deal, IMO. Plus I just love running fast. For me, its already very viable
 
I mean admittedly endurance is pretty good, yeah. Endurance skills also yield dividends in the form of +4 possible attribute points (and with re-speccing it can effectively become +6 attribute points). But we don't really need to invest any attribute points into endurance to get those freebie attribute points, nor do we need any investment to make bank with smithing, so I guess I agree that it's a endurance is a good attribute by itself. Don't get me wrong, I usually try to max out endurance as well, and I think that athletics is phenomenal.

My main problem is that further investment into these "warrior skills" don't give nearly as good marginal a benefit as speccing into Int, Soc & Cng, except maybe athletics 275 perk as the player. There's not that much point to having 330 skill levels in one handed over 218, or a high level smithing in general, we are already able to attack faster than most enemies and kill them with a single hit most of the time long before we reach that point anyways. Most additional investments in result in overkill except athletics, because additional survivability is always very good (and maybe except with two handed with cleaving weapons if they can only kill a 2nd enemy with the final perk?).

I like the example of +1 party size for every skill point after 300, things like that does definitely make these skills more viable.
 
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One hurdle you can't get over is bang for your buck.

If you spec into Vigor, you are picking only 1 of the 3 skills to focus on. If you spec into INT and END, you focus on all 3. Cunning and Social you are probably getting 2 in each.

You'd basically need a way to add a victory condition by being a God of the Arena. Some way to massively scale up arena betting?

I can't imagine spending 15 Focus points on Control skills and leveling everyone up to 300+.
 
One hurdle you can't get over is bang for your buck.

If you spec into Vigor, you are picking only 1 of the 3 skills to focus on. If you spec into INT and END, you focus on all 3. Cunning and Social you are probably getting 2 in each.

You'd basically need a way to add a victory condition by being a God of the Arena. Some way to massively scale up arena betting?

I can't imagine spending 15 Focus points on Control skills and leveling everyone up to 300+.
This is also very true, while I can somewhat envision even investing 15 focus points for all melee skills for making a godlike infantry captain and weapon master build (though it would still be much worse than int, soc and cng builds) there's literally no reason for investing into all control skills, the additional skill points in other weapons don't even help for captains. Even if we basically cheated points and invested all of them to control, we don't even have enough weapon slots to equip all ranged weapon variants in the first place.

One possible solution would be shuffling all the skills in vig, ctrl & endurance into different attributes. For example, we could put 2 Handed, Throwing and Smithing under vigor, Polearms, Crossbow and Riding under control, and 1 Handed, Bow and Athletics under endurance. Hell, these changes would even make some logical sense as well. But it still wouldn't get rid of the problem of investing extra attribute points being a waste due to overkill and such.
 
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I don't think combat should be part of the perk system and should just level up automatically as you fight, since its the part of the game that is actually fun to play for the most part. Most of the unintuitive, useless or nonsensical perks are in the combat section.
 
The obvious answer is more party wide benefits instead of captain only. Right now, medicine has the strongest general buff to troops and it's in int. It really should get nerfed, as it's kind of absurd, but regardless vigor needs something more like that. A combat party leader should have fewer and more expensive, but significantly stronger troops.

Though you can stack certain captain perks that are ~pretty good, they're really only strong if your character is captain of most/all of your troops and you specifically stack perks to benefit one unit type. And ... many polearm and one handed perks are infantry only captain bonuses. But rolling infantry only is ... not a great experience even with them.

An int/cha focused character can still get most of the best troop buffing perks via endurance and doesn't miss much for going light in vigor and/or control. And they'll still be very strong in combat just due to optimal gear choices.
 
I think the posts in this thread have some interesting ideas on the subject too.
 
For vigor, make the character suck more at using weapons by default. Make a skill requirement for some weapons. In warband having low skill made most weapons feel slow an awkward, in bannerlord the character is perfectly fine with zero skill and can win tournaments against lords with zero skill in melee. The reason it's worth investing in Bow is because bow sucks without skill and skill is required to use better bows. Any revision to vigor perks would be a nice bonus too, especially more support (no +damage)bonuses. Some existing perks could be more broad to increase their usefulness like giving a bonus to any troop under captain or party with the weapon type rather then only cav/infantry and so on. These little things are too petty.
Also, the last couple perks need to have a powerful effect that give the player an advantage. just more damage/speed isn't useful with at all it need to be bonuses or abilities that make great impact or allow you to do something new.

I think endurance is fine, the only issue is smithing is hit or miss, if you don't want to do it it's a waste of skill tied to endurance, but that's true for all attribute groups. I mean the perks could always use a revision though, but they're in better shape then most skills.

I think removing attributes/attribute grouping and just using FP would improve the situation a lot too. The issue is some attribute groups have 2-3 useful or
complimentary skills, while things like vigor and control have redundant skills, so obviously it's better to put attributes in something that give you more skills that benefit you. But if it it was just skill VS Skill then it doesn't matter anymore and would make it feel more free in progression and character building.

I don't think combat should be part of the perk system and should just level up automatically as you fight, since its the part of the game that is actually fun to play for the most part. Most of the unintuitive, useless or nonsensical perks are in the combat section.
That's an excellent Idea!
 
Lmao why the hell are there bots in the forums of a somewhat niche medieval sandbox rpg game? Like who spent time programming a bot to scam people in a game forum with at most 200 people?
 
I don't think combat should be part of the perk system and should just level up automatically as you fight, since its the part of the game that is actually fun to play for the most part. Most of the unintuitive, useless or nonsensical perks are in the combat section.
100% agree. Thats what KCD had and it was phenomenal. The more you fight, the more experienced and better you become without useless unlocks.
 
Without a huge regrouping of many skills and perks I think the way of RBM is acceptable. Skill influences the damage etc. of weapons more than in vanilla. I'm not a great fan of the clumsy Warband starter combat, however being as player superior to any high tier in BL from the beginning is garbage too. In RBM it is almost impossible to win early on against well armored high tier units.

That does not solve the fact that Vigor and Co. aren't that useful for the battle game. Party leaders/captains with high combat skills should make the combat skills of soldiers better. The combat trees should be more about party strength, the lower trees about army strength. Such a reconfiguration will of course not happen.

One thought I regularly have when watching combat in BL is "people should not block a strike with their face/breast/belly so often". Why are the NPCs so stupidly bad at blocking? To make the life not too miserable for the player. It's difficult to find a sweet spot here. But generally high combat party leader perks could make the soldiers better at blocking and weapon use. So that you had a similar effect than with the 275 Medicine perk but without magical hp increase. And if morale would play any role in the game (sadly it does not) such higher perks could boost morale.
 
The problem with player skills affecting party combat skills is that it's just magic. Your guys just get better with no visual or behavioral indicator. That ****e is in total war from shogun 2 onwards and it sucks. They always have to neuter it's effects to flaccid, imperceptible 3% increases to prevent it from completely breaking the game and nullifying the need for tactics or skill.

The developers should just accept the fact that combat skills don't really matter after the early game except for letting the player have fun during battles. The players irl skills should be way more of a factor than the stats. I would have no issue with the combat skill tree easily maxing out before the lategame, so long as the player uses the same loadout.
 
There is a lot of magic in the perks. Why do people get more hp with good medicine? It is ok that they don't die that often but the existence of doctors in the camp don't make people more resistant to sword cuts.

You can imagine that a party leader/captain with good combat skills sees their importance and puts big efforts into training to make the soldiers better. So it trickles down the rangs. There is a mod, Tutelage, which has companions profit from high skills of other companions, that's the same idea.
 
The issue is putting every form of progression and jamming it into the current skill/attributes/perks system.
They should've just separated combat progressions from your administrative or other personal skills; I don't even know why clan leader perk is there (we already have clan tiers? or the fact there's barely any perks applicable anyways). Governor perks could've acted more like a simple A/B perk path (maybe 5 levels or something) that you pick and develop the longer someone is a governor at X fief.

Or they should've treated the AI/companion skill path completely separate from the player as it still makes no sense why some skills only affect the clan leader, only the party leader, only the governor. Some perks will just never be of use even after managing to get a companion to get to that skill level.
 
I've never liked the idea of manually assigning skills for companions in RPGs anyway. It's annoying and immersion-breaking enough for the player, and it becomes a nightmare for more than a small handful of guys. It's silly that you can get a guy who has never so much as organised a pub meetup, and level him up to be a master administrator using focus points while he loses his humanity massacring people. It's such a stupid tendency in RPGs and by far the worst thing DnD style tabletops lent to video games.

Having to level administration through actual practice would be a much more natural way to make starting a kingdom from scratch difficult. Putting your bandit tier companions in a clan and making them city governors should go about as well as you would expect.
 
The attributes are more like morale and troop wages though which make more sense than increasing attack and defense.
No no, it increased their attack and defense stats, which determines how much they hit/dodge:

A general or king can bestow a valour bonus on his army by way of his stars. For every second star a general has all units under his command will receive a point of special valour. This valour only gives +1 attack +1 defence, it doesn't give a morale bonus like regular valour
Source: frostbeastegg guide
 
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