Valiant Horizon dev: what even are basic actions anyway?

February 25, 2023

So some of my early playtest feedback is that melee feels less good than range which...yeah, tactics games are sure like that, huh! I'm fixing to handle this in a few ways right now.

The obvious moves first:

• Lower the utility of Far range attacks. (This is even more pronounced because 3/6 of my players have abilities that hit to Far - basically almost all of the ones in the book. It's a good stress test at least!) Far range support is probably fine.
• Add movement to a lot of powers. I'd done this with some of the later classes I designed (self-buff powers, for example, are usually move + buff) but the older ones could stand to have that energy too.

Now for the weird moves.

• Take out the default Hustle (aka move to Near) action. Get rid of it. Who needs a default "move" action? (enemies still have one though)
• INSTEAD, replace it with an extra Standard for each class that does move + something. (See Shadowstep above.)

In addition to giving each class a little more flair, this has a few fun bonuses.

• At level 4 you can prepare other Classes' standards instead of your own, and at levels 4 and 7 you get an extra standard. Originally this meant you'd just get another default way to attack most of the time, but now you have more interesting choices: you could prepare 2 attack and 1 movement standard, 2 movement/1 attack, 3 movement ones, 3 attack ones (if you rely a lot on powers/traits that move you around, of which there are more now), the sky's the limit.
  • I don't know if it's funnier to take no movement or all movement - no movement is probably it but it's close - but both are probably viable if you're clever.
• Purely a parallelism nitpick: aside from trivial Interact actions, there are now no combat actions that don't involve a roll. (Hustle was the only one prior to this.)

(Read the original on cohost here!)