Leveling system still unenjoyable and unbalanced

Does the leveling system SUCK?

  • yes

    Votes: 110 75.3%
  • no

    Votes: 14 9.6%
  • anime tiddies

    Votes: 35 24.0%

  • Total voters
    146

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Scouting is legitimately one of like four skills that companions can easily level up past 200 in. The others are Stewardship, Trade and Riding.

in how many years, and how many level-ups must they endure first of all so that you can put all attribute points in cunning? And that's if they do not die in the process, as well. Maybe it is how you say, but still, I think we can agree that leveling up skills needs major tweaking, if we are to make every skill viable and every perk attainable (with a certain grind of course, but one that makes more sense than the current one). Maybe if the exp cap would be at 300 learning limit then it would feel a bit better. Why can we even have 330+ learning limit? It's so unnecessary and such a bad design, when every skill point costs tens of thousands of exp, maybe even hundreds of thousands of exp at that point!!! It's already very grindy by 300.

Why does smithing improve legendary chances for every skill point after 300 skill? That is so unnecessary. If you get the perk at 275 skill, it should give you 1% chance to craft a legendary item, then increase by 1% every skill point after that, reaching 25% chance to craft a legendary (1/4 chances) at 300. So easy.

RIDING - instead of "each 10 riding skill after 200 (when you gain the perk at 275, so stupid...) (also that's 13 maneuver and 13 charge damage at 330), they should make it every 1 skill after 275 gives 0.5 maneuver and 0.5 charge damage. So at 300, 25 skills = 12.5 charge damage and 12.5 maneuver which is basically the same damn thing.

Trading settlements is fine at 300, the perk doesn't even benefit of anything else more so if that is the case can just leave it at 300 since it's a major gameplay feature. But again, what is the point of 330 limit or whatever it is? We don't want characters to become OP, so why do we make it grindable after 300 skill anyway?

MEDICINE - instead of "for every 2 skill points after 200 gives your troops +1hp (again dumb, since you get the skill at 275.), which would be 50 hp at 300 and 65 hp at 330, INSTEAD make it give for every skill point after 275 +1hp or even 2hp if you want (but it's too op I'd say). That is 25 or 50 hp at 300. AGAIN, different design, same result, =better design that makes more sense and is less grindy because you don't have to farm exp from 300+. Why can we grind skill after 300, again. Isn't there a lot of grind in the game already? Why not give us a feeling of accomplishment if we are to grind SO MUCH? Like: I have reached 300 skill, omg, am feeling so good and proud about my work. That's how you give skills an "end-game", a proper end-game that makes you feel accomplished. But no, you can still gain skill points and you achieved basically nothing by the end of it, no sense of "I did this".

Do you get my point? Can do this for pretty much every skill. Their shaky design (look at combat skills, the last perk on some give you certain things after 200 skill points, some give you after 250. WHAT IS THIS INCONSISTENCY ABOUT, PLEASE.) All of those skills you attain only at 275, yet none starts giving you stats from 275. It can be designed way better than this... it really doesn't take a genius to fix this. But the person that is choosing these designs, I feel like really hates symmetry and proper consistency for some reason, and I'd prefer if it were the opposite.
 
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in how many years, and how many level-ups must they endure first of all so that you can put all attribute points in cunning?

Attribute points are pretty minor, all things considered, I think you only need like four to reaching 200 Scouting.

As for time spent, I think four years, starting from 60 or 80 on my companion. It is one of the easiest skills to power level on a companion, for real. Most skills suck to level on companions but Scouting is one of the good ones, haha.
 
Random NPC is a stupid idea. I hope it is just temporary that tw will add not random npc when they have time.
 
Well...since we don't have books to read that might add focus points, push learning limits or grant extra skill points we are a bit at a loss, don't you think?
In my book missions for criminals should give roguery for instance instead of charm and have a chance of not being detected. A horrid design is the fence goods mission. You can only do it by losing money (but get good relation boost to 2 merchants) or to piss them off and get criminal rating because you are ALWAYS caught.

I really want the books back - they were good. Add some monastery where you can study. And for heaven's sake: make governor skills apply to clan leader! Since he governs ALL of his fiefs. Maybe reduced to 50% effect but stacking with a governor in place. I mean...why does almost every perk have a secondary ability that we NEVER can use since we never can be governors?!

What if we could be appointed governor by our jarl/sultan/king/emperor or whatever before we can hold our first fief?
Abilities? Get salary, may upgrade castle (maybe request lord's money for boosts), have access to dungeon and garrison and lord's hall in that fief. Talk with lord about useful stuff like what to do next (councilor function). I cannot believe how much possibilities are just squandered for making the game some kind of Call of Duty with swords and bows instead. The game could be an open world rich with RPG, empire building, trading, questing AND epic battles.

You are very right, everything you said makes sense to me. I feel like what you're saying is a good idea, to apply a sort-of a halved bonus from your governor perks, also books were really cool. But I'd be honestly happy with even being able to govern ONE fief, and apply those bonuses to it. Really that is all I can ask for at this point, since there is no use for those perks and I don't even think taleworlds will make them useful to the player ever....

I am using bannerlordstweaks mod because of the slow leveling. My xp gain is increased substantially.
Yes I saw that mod. But I wish they balanced the game themselves officially. It's funny that it's a top-mod, yet they don't seem to think there is a problem with their current system, when many people are already tweaking their game...

I have easily managed to get shooting and horse riding to 300 plus as a dedicated horse archer so those are definitely do able and by extension I would imagine crossbows are too if you can use them mounted as it lets you rack up a lot of kills (although I enjoy hunting step bandits and trying to solo some fights so I'll admit it might not be to all tastes).
On foot I think it would be much trickier and Athletics and close combat levelling is harder in general.
Smithing is broken so doesn't count but easy enough to max out at 330 if you want to invest the points and like making javelins.
I have nearly managed to get trade to 300 without any cheating and think it is doable, but damn the last 25 drag an unbelievable amount. It's why I'm so glad they have kept the everything has there price as it makes an end goal for what will not be a quick process
Leadership is broken unless you lead armies which I feel is a bit stupid as the perks in it benefit you leading your party and it feels wrong to lock them to only happening when you lead armies.
I don't auto resolve battles so have no idea on tactics.
Scouting once you get to the ones that help you find tracks around the 100 mark levels ok and have got over 200 in it.
Steward is also a fairly ok one and I've got over 200 in that.
Roguery as you said is fairly broken.
The worst is medicine I have tried with a maxed out focus and int character and amassed about 30points in a fairly long play through (although I didn't starve or hit my own troops to up my XP gain which some say does work).
I personally have come to use mods to grant 100% XP in tournament/arena (which should be on as standard IMO as it's player time spent fighting so why not reward it fully) and also 1 attribute point per level which helps you having to be dedicated to a single path or be a low level generalist.
Then again I am more of a Skyrim than a total war player and so am more interested in developing a character as much as I can, again very much not to all tastes, but it works for me.
As Rulin says Bannerlord tweaks lets you adjust these settings as much as you wish
Bannerlord Tweaks - Update at Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Nexus - Mods and community
Personally though I think levelling rate for everything other than medicine, roguery, leadership and the very last bit of trade isn't too bad as long as you get full tournament/arena XP (and if you want to be good at lots of skills 1 attribute point per level).
Very good input, thank you. Yes, I do imagine the 100% exp in tournament/arena is a MUST. At the beginning of development I thought that they should reduce the exp or it would become abusable, but right now I think it's ESSENTIAL to good gameplay to be able to hone your skills in an arena. I hope they change that design decision ASAP. Also I agree, shooting off a horse seems to level-up riding and shooting pretty quickly... but the best way to do that is basically to fight low level parties alone, gallop back, turn around, headshot people while sitting still. I wonder if this is the intended gameplay that taleworlds imagined for us, lol.

Leadership can come with high party moral thus getting gourmand helps. Since Leadership levels raise morale as well this will be buffing itself over time. The first steps are the hardest. As for tactics...i reckon you get some XP for giving orders to troops as well (lead troops). I got that during a fight and not in autoresolve.

Yes you do get very little tactics skill for giving commands in battle, but it's totally insignificant I feel like. Might as well not give any

Some levelling ends up being passive - and that's the best kind - Once I have sufficient income, I make as many parties as I can afford, and I keep them with me in a permanent army - your own parties don't cost influence. It leads to me levelling through leadership and ending up quite high without even noticing. Once you make 200 leadership, everyone is smiling at you, all the time. If you have 4-500 troops in your own army, then even when you add another 500 to go on campaign, the influence boost from having all your parties in an army usually funds the influence cost for adding other parties.

Trade is doable, and if you really focus on it, you can get to 300 in between 500-1000 game days depending on distractions. I always start with trade anyway. You can get to 150-175 trade within a couple of hundred game days and the passive gains this gives you makes everything else in game much much easier - even if you don't continue to 300 - including passively levelling your character and clan up. So I always start with a solid grounding in trade before I do anything else.

I think the levelling of traits isn't too bad. Getting up to 200 in most isn't that difficult, but because of the inflationary way that building sills works, that last 100 in any trait can be a killer. I tend to end up with a character that after 10 years is rated highly in many traits, exceptionally in a couple and world leading at maybe one I have focussed on (usually trade). But I'd expect that anyone who wants to become the best in the world at smithing or archery should probably have to put in years of game time to get there at the expense of other traits. It shouldn't be easy. It should be exceptionally hard.

Indeed starting with trading seems like a solid choice, I always played like that in the past as well, helped economy greatly (everything from selling equipments to selling trading goods). In comparison to trading, roguery (give more loot) seems pretty bad. To be an efficient bandit it seems like you also need to be a good trader. I wish items that you raid or steal from peasants or caravans would be marked as "RED" color and you could sell them and make roguery experience just like you make trading experience when selling the green stuff (trading profit). To me that is a way they could fix roguery for good. As for the leadership, it seems so bad to me. Should have leadership exp when leading your own troops, and should gain roguery exp when leading bandit troops, that simple. All of these steps combined would really make skill leveling good, but yeah, you have to abuse army mechanic to do anything with leadership, which to me is very dumb...

It should be much MUCH faster considering that your character is now not immortal compared to Warband. OP is completely correct in that the insanely slow levelling does not match the super fast pace of everything else in the game.
pretty much, and I can't wait for the feature for our character to die in battle. I really wish for that (dying to bandits etc). But even if they don't implement such a thing, the skills still need to be tweaked as the last levels are just impossible...

They really need to balance there leveling to the rest is the game. With war and battles happening non-stop then a slow painful grubs of leveling and attributes which sadly add next to nothing they need to make a change as they currently feel like they are from two different games. And I don't even use companions really in my latest runs as they die immediately and never upgrade.
Same, companions seem like a true waste of time atm... If there were higher tiered armors that you could buy for lots of money and equip them with, then they would be pretty cool. But right now regular troops are more useful than companions. All that companions are good for is putting them in a settlement to passively gain relations, or send them on caravan duty :/

medicine suck deep, leadership, athletics, roguery, all these skills are insane hard to lvl.
most easy one is stewardship
trade skill is usless now since its nearly impossible to gain 300 skill for >Everything has a price< perk

agreed. For me trading seems like too much work for one or two good perks. Everything has a price of course, and the perk that gives you interest (max 1000gold) seems good also. But other than that you are stuck in repetitive go from town to town and buy cheap sell high. The problem with this design is that the game really doesn't need more money that what you gain by, let's say, 100 or 150+ skill points in trading. At that point making money is already so easy that grinding past that you do solely for those 2 perks in my opinion, and it's not really fun... I'd rather do something else at that point. Yeah, the perk to trade settlements might be very fun, but for how many players is it worth the trading grind I wonder.

they should either balance it so all perks are useful or just simplify it back to how it was in warband
Charm has two rows of perks that only have an effect for a governor, pretty funny... I do agree that every perk should be in one way useful to both the player, companions, if you're a captain in a battle... I would prefer if they made every perk situational. For example: if you're governor - gain 1 militia per day. If you're the leader of the party in a battle - give your troops a morale boost/or hp. But if you're a captain, that same perk would give a different effect, maybe a lower/halved effect (to make skills easier to create for the devs) or a completely different effect. That way everyone and everything can make use of their level-ups. Yes it is more complex, yes it would take more work and more thinking to do this right, but the end-result would definitely be more satisfying.

Attribute points are pretty minor, all things considered, I think you only need like four to reaching 200 Scouting.

As for time spent, I think four years, starting from 60 or 80 on my companion. It is one of the easiest skills to power level on a companion, for real. Most skills suck to level on companions but Scouting is one of the good ones, haha.

that's great that we have at least one skill that we can level up on companions, lol. If I did a playthrough now would definitely get a scout, but I'll just wait until they fix more skills to be attainable by companions and players alike. The game can be fun now too (again, thank god for fixing performance issues on campaign map), but the lack of proper balance and tweaking in the leveling system always leaves me with a sour taste after a few hours of gameplay... It's literally my biggest gripe with the game, that is why I am focusing on it so much. So I hope they fix it soon.
 
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The leveling/skill/attribute system is garbage and there's no excuse for it.
The "level up =skill learning down" is absurdly bad design, like it was for a different game.
Levels give you nothing on there own, nothing but points to increase learning of skills.... but levels also slow down the learning of all skills.... wtf?
Nothing is balanced at all and doing anything will get you exp regardless of how you build you character.
Fighting battles = level 25 before you know it regardless of skills learned or points spent where and what not.
You get 6 free attributes from char creation and the player probably gets 6-9 in more in a game.
They barely do anything because the perks/skill are staggered out completely awkwardly so that it takes many attributes to just reach 1 or 2 more perks.
As if zero consideration for how the character would levels up was used in determining how much skill each fp and attribute allowed.
1 attributes per 4 levels is nothing and even if you cheat to have 10 in everything at the start of the game skills level so slowly when you level up, it doesn't matter. You're barely any better then the normal character at 500 days in or what not, so why so stingy?
And then your character dies anyways.
It's all parts that don't fit together.
It's like people brain stormed how to slow down character growth and game up with 3 or 4 ideas and then they said "**** it, lets use em all".

in how many years, and how many level-ups
Scouting and steward are pretty easy to get to 200. The thing with scouting is when it low it levels slow because they don't see any tracks, but if discover hideout it gives exp and they will increase, once they like 100 they get more passive from seeing tracks as you run around. Scouting is very good for MC I find, because the 275 perk is very powerful. I max cunning now and I feel pretty good about it. Roguery and tactics are another story though...
Scouting and Steward are the only passive skills I've gotten to 275+ on a char, though I did steward on the sister by retreating her from battle (to preserve low level/high learning) and putting her attributes into INT.

Leadership I "Think" might actually just be about how many units you have. This isn't scientific but just making clan party and giving 1/2 my troops and dragging them around didn't seem to net me more exp then with just my party(no army). However filling a clan party to max and having mine full did increase it as expected. Of course leading many many parties in an army give even more. Anyways, my point is it may be 'possible' to raise leadership okay without army once you have higher clan rank and party+ perks by using you big party all the time. It's slow but it's not as slow as I thought.
 
I actually like the leveling system. I feel it greatly expanded upon the system used in Warband while adding in unique role play abilities.

In Warband a character could only focus in one or two skills and have them be exceptionally high or they could get several skills in the 5-7 range and have a well rounded character.

It appears the design for Bannerlord is the same. With Focus Points you can pretty much get any skill to 175, but not much higher. If you put all of your Ability gains into one Ability, you can get those associated skills to 300+.

Alternatively, you could spread around Ability gains and have numerous Skills above 200, but none at 275. Jack of all trades, but master of none.

Once you view the system in this manner, it makes a lot more sense. You now plan and customize your character.

Also, I don't think the argument is the leveling system is bad, but the XP rewarded for specific skills is horrid. Changing Medicine gains to reward more XP for saving an NPCs life would help that skill level up. Save a Tier 1 unit, you get 5 XP. Save a Tier 5, you get 50 XP. Save a Hero unit you get 100 XP. (I don't know what the XP is now for each of these, I just picked numbers here to show an example.) The same scaling would apply when they are no longer injured. This would not only have medicine level up faster, but it would also scale with your character's progression through the game.

Change Leadership to award more XP based upon unit level recruited. Tier1 is 1 XP, Tier 2 is 2 XP, etc. Noble units are 10 XP. Heroes are 50 XP. Give XP for leveling up units. Getting someone to reach their full potential is a great example of Leadership. Small changes like this to award more XP and creating additional places to earn XP would solve the problem with improving Leadership.

As AnandaShanti states though, the level up learning penalty should be removed. It appears to be designed to ensure you can't have numerous Skills above 200. It basically ensures you can't learn a new skill late in the game.
 
What 5 and how?
Now look, after the first two weeks, it became rather obvious to me that Main Character can not win battles alone. Parties and Armies win battles. So the main focus should be on the skills which allow you to gather and lead big armies and support as many parties as you possibly can. Therefore Steward, Charm, Leadership, Trade are the most important skills in the game. Melee or Ranged prowess of our characters are optional and benefits from perks from combat skills are rather mediocre if even noticeable.
So yes, you can tailor your character to have 10 INT and 10 SOC with enough focus points left not only to put 5 on each skill but also develop some other skills, for example in combat skills. With 10 attributes and 5 focus, our skill limit is 330. And yes it will take years to max them out, but it is still possible.
 
I know mods shouldn't be the solution for everything but until TW improves it Leveling Rebalance never leaves my load order, it even has a plus version with more tweaks (specially one to the economy to normalize prices instead of 500K armor)
 
:S mods for Warband actually changed the game for the better, but i really hope Bannelord would not suffer the same fate. Mods should not fix the game.
yup, mods in warband/classic were amazing but i really hope (and am here annoying the devs everyday with feedback lol) that vanilla bannerlord becomes an amazing and balanced game that won't be so reliable on mods to really shine :smile:
 
Wouldn't that require character level 36 or higher?
one of my characters died at age 58 at level 39. And no, no mods no console commands. You see, steward is a skill that kicks the development of your character, or charm depending on how you wanna play it. Trade is also an option, but as it now i'm happy with trade 125 and do not go further. But you can get trade 330 in ~1000-1200 days if you want to.
You see, we can't always fight in such scales so investment in Vigour or Control would have a positive impact on character level and development, yet steward levels up as long as you have enough food variety. Charm goes up through quests, kingdom decisions, and interactions with enemy lords. Yes, this game is about fighting and conquering, but management has a significant role as well.
The problem is, combat skills do not provide the same level of positive effects as management perks do, we can't be a Warlord, but we can be a General.(if you get what i mean). So yes, i really doubt that let say TwoHanded can be increased to 330 on a character. The character will die of old age faster, or there would be no enemies left to fight with, imho. But you can always have steward, charm, leadership, trade, and smithing at level 330 if you want to.
 
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