Grimrock

A have 100% faith in you guys and the solution definitely can work and play well.

The main thing that I find problematic with the mechanic is that this kind of forces 1 char to hold the focus, and the rest of the party just standing there, so I think it's a mechanic better suited for a 1-char realtime rpg. I have this image of the fighter getting ready for a deadly thrust, and the rest watching him "hey, nice blow, Contar.", "yeah, you really nailed that snail!", "Ok, can I shoot my arrow now?".

Unless the cooldowns are much higher, another problem I see is that it could render them less significant: if you want to use special attacks by 2 or 3 chars, by the time you charge and use all of them, when you get back to the first it's cooldown will probably have finished and you can just attack again.

Another way to put it: You attack with fighter #1. Now he's in cooldown. With fighter #2, the cost of waiting for the charge is lessend, since you have to wait anyway for the cooldown of champ #1, let's use it productively to charge a weapon.

I made some test graphs with excel, and the most efficient scenarios are either when both fighters attack with normal or with special attacks. If however champion #1 uses a special attack and champion #2 a normal attack, the attack rate is the same as when they were both using special attacks (considering cooldown stays constant).

But of course, in other scenarios it works well, anyway it's always a trade-off, every system will have some weaker spots.

I can think in a solution that in my opinion would be good. What about right click for standard attack and left click for secondary?
This way you can change weapons only from your inventory, like drag and drop for the character hand.

Or the secondary attack would go off when pressing (cntr/space/other "power up button") + mouse clicking.

And what comes to those charges maybe there's some items that can give weapons their charges back (I'm thinking of Skyrim's soul gems),
but those charge item's would be still a rare resource. If the weapons can be charged unlimited times that makes them worthless.
I never used charge weapons in Grimrock1, and in the end of the game I had my backpacks full of stuff like fireswords and poison daggers that I never dared to use. Not even in the boss fight

uggardian wrote:Or the secondary attack would go off when pressing (cntr/space/other "power up button") + mouse clicking.

And what comes to those charges maybe there's some items that can give weapons their charges back (I'm thinking of Skyrim's soul gems),
but those charge item's would be still a rare resource. If the weapons can be charged unlimited times that makes them worthless.
I never used charge weapons in Grimrock1, and in the end of the game I had my backpacks full of stuff like fireswords and poison daggers that I never dared to use. Not even in the boss fight

Yeah, they mentioned in the blog how people fear using charges. I think a few recharges could alleviate that a little.

Secondary attack will rock... like Wizardry, can BITE, FIRE BREATH... why not ? class got some extra attack like BASH..

Why shield cant bash ?? that cold be nice..

i hope they heAR us !

Signature spells for staffs: Clicking the staff once would open the rune table, but it would also have a signature spell used like secondary attacks. For example, an oakstaff has an ability to call a swarm of bees. It does very low damage, but takes only tiny amount of energy. Serpent staff opens specific egyptian runed doors as secondary attack (like zo spell from DM), white staff would cast a blast of light that damages greatly the undead but does no harm to other creatures, etc.

Yep, secondary attacks for staves are definitely something we'd like to do! Serpent Staff is a great idea!

Another option. You can break weak walls using secondary attack (smash attack or similar). Only on fake walls for this purpose (not always walls opened by buttons or simply ilusionary walls).

Dhomochevsky wrote:Another option. You can break weak walls using secondary attack (smash attack or similar). Only on fake walls for this purpose (not always walls opened by buttons or simply ilusionary walls).

Smashable walls should look at least slightly different than normal walls. Maybe some cracks on them. No-one likes to hit every wall just to know wether it can be smashed or not.

Exactly uggardian, imagine all the people smashing every wall