Suggestions on improving influencing

Ssaliss

I've been thinking about influencing for a while now, and how it's more or less worthless to influence if you only have one influence attack, and even with two it's very often more or less pointless. In fact, it seems to me that the only way to be a semi-decent influencer is to have at least enough influencing so that you have all three attacks; being transcendant gives you another huge boost through charismaticaura.

My proposition is rather simple: Remove the decrease in attack strength, and instead add a bonus for using more than one attack. For instance, if you just use begging, you'll do 100 damage (number taken from the vacuum of space) per attack. Doing another kind of attack increases the damage of that ability by 15%, up to a max of 30%. An example of a normal influencing session:

Begging: 100 damage (boosts supplication and wheedling to 115 damage each)
Supplication: 115 damage (boosts begging to 115 and wheedling to the max of 130)
Wheedling: 130 damage (boosts begging to 130 and supplication to 115 damage)
Begging: 130 damage (boosts supplication to 130 damage and wheedling to 115 damage)

After this, by alternating the attacks you always hit for 130 damage. If you only have two attacks, you'd do 100 damage the first attack and 115 per following attack. Only having a single attack means you'd do 100 damage per attack.

The increasing ego used to influence would still be present to prevent everyone from influencing everything. Alternatively, remove the ego cost of influencing something, and instead make mobs counter-influence much like they counterattack.

Xenthos

I have discussed this with them in terms of the overhaul. It turns out that everything is tied into the "willfulness" of the mob. The more willful it is, the less damage each attack does... and the more damage they do back to you, too. By removing the willfulness so as to remove decreased damage done over time, you are also making it so that the mobs never do more damage to you.

In the end, they decided to just make everyone influence as if they had more base charisma, because it was very complicated to mess with it otherwise.

Ssaliss

They'd still be able to keep willfulness, just... not have it affect damage taken, just ego drained.

Xenthos

Ssaliss said:

They'd still be able to keep willfulness, just... not have it affect damage taken, just ego drained.

As I said, they indicated it was more complicated than that.

Everiine

As is often the case, we think the code works very simply right in line with what we suggest, but in nearly all cases, the code is actually much, much more complicated. We just don't see it.

Tarkenton

Honestly, at this point, just assume the code is about the same as a freshman end of term project that was finished ten minutes before class. Poor documentation, extra garbage code that doesn't need to be there, and functional only within very specific parameters.