This is a placeholder for my future portfolio. It is not my work but it is something that I will be aiming for when I became a game designer specializing in game systems design.
Neverwinter is a game that I think has a very good combat system largely due to how it handles the game system for its player stats. Players often love to min-max all their characters in the game and those that are truly dedicated will try to understand the game from its raw calculations and work from there.
Neverwinter has multiple types of stats but for calculation purposes, they can be grouped into Power, Normal Ratings, Armor Penetration, and Utility Ratings.
In Neverwinter, power mostly represents how much damage you deal. With the formula that Neverwinter uses, the actual line when graphed out starts from 1. This means that with 0 power, a player deals 100% of their damage. This makes sense because players should always be dealing all of their base damage even without power. The power calculations are also consistent because from the graph, every 400 points into power nets the player 1% more damage. This gives players an easy way of understanding their stats, a messy way would have been something like "For every 255.67 points, you gain 1.064% more damage".
Normal ratings in Neverwinter are any stats besides power, armor penetration, and utility. It can be critical strike, defense, recovery, etc. The graph above for normal ratings actually has the same formula as the power graph but it starts from 0. This makes sense for two reasons. First is that these ratings should not be 100% from the start; a player should not have 100% critical strike when starting out. Secondly, the graph is consistent as 400 points still nets 1% of the stat being invested into. This allows players to have a consistent way of understanding their stats.
Armor penetration in Neverwinter is essentially how much damage reduction you ignore from enemies. Unlike the other stats, it no longer follows the 400:1 ratio. In fact, for every 400 points, you gain much more, rounding down to around 5%. This means that armor penetration is much easier to get as a stat. However, with the way armor penetration works, it is only a damage increase because you ignore more of the damage reduction an enemy has. In other words, if an enemy has 50% damage reduction and you have 55% armor penetration, you have 5% armor penetration wasted. This also makes sense because players should be able to access armor penetration easily as percentage damage reduction can scale to extreme amounts but they should be punished for over investing in such an accesible stat.
Utility ratings in Neverwinter would be something like movement speed. Utility ratings are the only type of rating that features diminishing returns. I think the use of diminishing returns here is excellent. It is better than just placing a cap on the stats as it is a less direct and less controlling way to limit players. Instead of just restricting players to a cap, players can invest more into a utility rating but they will gain less benefit instead of no benefit. The necessity for diminishing returns is also there as utility is a stat that can get out of control and doesn't follow the intended gameplay. It would not make sense for a player to be moving 500% more speed which means the player most likely wouldn't be fighting and could skip most combat.
Overall, this is the type of game systems I am aiming to be able to design. It is easy to understand for players and not unnecessarily complex. It is also consistent and only breaks out from the consistency when necessary. Although I focused more on players, it is also easy for other developers to understand due to the consistency and logic in the calculations used.
