A lot of combat engines are just pure pugilism. You manage progress bars. Tactical considerations, like distance, speed and (in the case of projectile weapons) zones of cover are a lot more interesting than just grinding up to TEH UBERTANKZOR and exchanging blows.

EVE uses range and a dizzying array of clever features, like turret tracking speed versus transverse velocity and explosion radius versus signature radius and sensor strength and radial velocity and such and such. It's pretty sweet, and a low-level character in a fighter that can avoid large, clumsy turrets up close is more than a match for a battleship pilot that can destroy space stations. It's all about preparation and tactics.

One thing to try out is not make it necessaraly per hit point of damage/healing, but each hit being a percentage of the expiriance points they would be rewarded based on the damage done to a creature. If you are destroying orcs, which at your combat level are worth 80EXP, have 200HP, and each time you hit them you cause 100HP damage, you should get roughly 40EXP. Offensive mages should be the same. Skills in healing need to be handled a bit differantly, and I would not stick that in the same class of expiriance points IMHO, but the solution for that would be to take the amount of health points that the target recovered, or better yet, their need for the recovery, and retrieve a portion of the expiriance points that the fighter gained previously. This would probably solve alot of your game balance issues.

I just thought I'd mention that most Diku MUD derivatives use experience on damage done aswell as end of combat experience. I've always found it to work quite well. Perhaps you could take a look at those for balance issues/ideas.

I would be careful introducing an experience on swing or experience on use system. While it can make sense it can also lead to repetitive gameplay very easily.

As an example by this logic then you could practice on a training dummy endlessly to increase your skill however do you think the player would enjoy that?

A combination of difficulty and success tends to work, as in UO, but that's still totally open to powergaming and repetitive gameplay. Find that sword that does 0 damage against enemy X and find some safe way to stand there hitting enemy X and you get unlimited experience... not so good.

Hi,

Also if you lump attacking and healing into the same xp scale, you'll still have a problem imo. Fighters will always have more monsters to kill than healers have people to heal. Or the other side is a healer could sit in a pack on monsters with a bunch of mana potions healing themselves up for mass xp with no effort.


- Chris