I'm making tweaks as I go along with my current melee testing character. My intent is to make four builds (mage, melee, archer, assassin) viable to complete the game. Mage is already viable, so I haven't messed around with that much. Some of what I have done is as follows:
1) experience gain in Gipath and Ingos has been adjusted upward. Lvl 1 enemies give 5 exp and then there is a 5 exp/level gain on enemies. I have not touched exp in Suslanger or Cave.
2) Drops are adjusted upward for most enemies. Depending on human enemies gear, I have them drop anywhere from 1-4 pieces of whatever material their gear is made of.
3) Defense/attack for enemies starts at 12 for level 1 enemies and then increases in increments of 7 per level. I ended up leaving the start amount alone but set the incremental increases to 5 per level. This enables a quicker advancement through Gipath and Ingos. But it still takes a while.
4) It may never be used, but I've adjusted the perk increases for Astral and Sensory magics upward 10-25-50. This is to make it possible to make the strongest possible spell in each class. The elemental magics are fine in their current state.
5) Weapon proficiencies are now 10-20-30 instead of the 5-10-15. This is necessary in order to help melee characters achieve an attack rating high enough to break through the 150 defense of the highest level enemies.
6) I've differentiated the weapons so that each weapon is noticeably different. It's my preference that axes be the most destructive weapon so they have the most damage and the highest attack. But there is a defense penalty that is not insignificant. The scale then slides next to clubs as the next most destructive weapon then to sword being fairly balanced and then to spears being a defensive weapon. Daggers, for assassins, are high attack weapons, but suffer a defense penalty in the amount of attack. So a +60 attack crystal dagger has a -60 defense penalty. Bows are also high attack weapons as well. I've adjusted the damage of every weapon upward by at least 33%, but I think they will need more. But I won't be able to tell until I can advance my melee character to levels 2 and 3 of the cave.
7) I've set Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence to increase by increments of 5 (for a total of 15 if all three levels are taken) instead of the measly and worthless 1 pt per level. And then I made them part of the highest cost group of skills and swapped encumberance, regeneration, and recovery to their place.
8) I increased the actions parameter to be 130-160-200 instead of the 115-130-150 it was before.
9) and back to weapons, I tried adjusting the speed per weapon (axes and clubs slower and all others faster), but that had the unintended consequence of allow enemies with those weapons to attack super quick.
10) I doubled the speed of the male and female character models. So now it's almost like playing single player in the fastest speed setting. This applies to movement speed only, not attack speed. Unfortunately this carries over to human enemies as well, but it still speeds up gameplay in a helpful manner.
I'm sure there are other adjustments I've made, but these are the ones I can recall at the moment. I'm sure that as I continue to advance with my testing melee character I will make additional adjustments. But thus far it has been fairly enjoyable without being easy.
