Essential DoD Skills I and II Finally Game-Ready!

I'm having some trouble with the first pack... I have it in the mods section and it shows up in the DoD mod launcher, and it has the right description and name in everything, but it gives me the same skills as pack II when actually in the game.

Okay, so it decided to work after I removed pack II from the mods folder. Huh.

 

Mac? Macs are wierd with mods right now.

 

Yeah, I'm using a mac.

 

What he said. The general solution is to surgically combine the two mods into one, which is what I've done for Swiftstriker and Essential DoD I (soon to include megacrafts and clockwork knight!).

 

So far, your mods rule! Poisoneer and Bushido are two of my favorite skills to use nowadays, and if i'm playing warrior, I always make sure Bushido's included due to it woring perfectly in tandem with such a path ^_^

 

Are you doing everything manually? I can explain how to use Notepad++ to run a more powerful forced merge that strips necessary tags and such, if you don't have such a tool available.

On-topic: the amount of ammo you get from Ninjitsu is pretty ludicrous. I'd put it on a long cooldown that forces you to use it less frequently than you currently can with natural regen + occasional booze, or reduce the item spawn amounts. On Batman I had a bunch of spare thrown weapons to sell to Brax for a bunch of cash even after constantly throwing things at every creature in sight up until they got into melee with me. I tried running a Gargle Blaster for awhile just to keep my mana down, but still didn't run out of stored-up ammo even after doing an entire floor with Szygy running.

Basically, each throw wasn't risking my health (which is normal) but also wasn't meaningfully risking my ammo or mana; everything in the base game risks one of the three resources. Even if mana is a bit of an overpowered resource, it's still a risked resource that, when depleted, leaves you with your pants down. It requires blood magic, leylines, or both just to stay in business.

Having rank 1 of Ninjitsu translated into a "reduce the difficulty of all creatures in the game by 30 to 80%, because IF they manage to get into melee with you, they've already been softened up by multiple throws" mod, moreso than a "act like a ninja" mod. Add a teleport skill for added ridiculousness, or simply be decent enough at melee to polish off the last chunk of HP monsters have when they get to you.

 

Really? I've played several run throughs with Ninjitsu and never really felt it made things too easy. Does anyone else have this experience? If so, I'll be happy to increase the mana cast and reduce the spawn amounts.

 

I'm honestly not worried about early on. I'm worried about DLs 8-15.

Philosophical tangent:

Because this game allows you to get any one capstone skill basically on DL1 or 2, I'm strictly of the opinion that the devs WANT you to survive until DL 6 or 7 without dying unless you're new to the game or make a stupid mistake. Honestly, when you can get a Mortal Machine at your side before you ever go down a set of stairs, the only reason you shouldn't at least meet a Snow Baal is that you don't pay enough attention.

Because of that, I'm honestly not worried about balance issues in the DL 1-6 range. But if you have a pile of Shuriken large enough that you're throwing huge damage around without an eye toward your ammo supply at DL 7, that's definitely an issue for me. I honestly haven't ever had that problem, but then I'm also the guy who forgets to use Spore Stash/Lucky Pick unless I'm completely out of the relevant summoned object.

Long and short of it is, if the high-end ammot is overly plentiful -- OR if the low-end ammo is still significantly powerful by DL 7ish -- the skill should be changed. I'd just like to hear whether or not people find that that's the case.

 

lol, my bad, I thought i was looking at the runecaster page.. sorry

 

How do I copy in to the DB? Im afradie of messing it up.

 

You don't have to copy anything into the DB for these skills. if you're talking about the Essential Core Rebalance/Essential Expansion Rebalance, it goes in three steps:

1) find your original game/expansion's "spellDB.xml" and "skillDB.xml".
2) Rename them to "spellDB.old" and "skillDB.old".
3) Unzip the new (rebalanced) "spellDB.xml" and "skillDB.xml" into that same folder.

 

Hey essence, the 66% chance to proc jaws of death ON EACH HIT, does that allow it to proc more than once per turn?

 

If you're surrounded and you get hit 4 times between actions, yeah, you can get up to 4 points of resistance in a single turn.

 

If that's the case, you MIGHT want to lower it a tad, it seems to build up too quickly when I'm surrounded. As you'll read about later, I had a rather... interesting... run-in with a B11 monster zoo.

 

You let yourself get surrounded?

 

I INTENTIONALLY got myself surrounded, to get the most out of jaws of death and mt self, which was my only hope against the sea crusaders, which were doing 15 damage per normal hit.

I expected it to be a far closer fight than it turned out to be. By leaping straight into the battle, I pretty much became invincible, between the multiple proccing stacked regens and jaws of death, which built up far more quickly than I expected.

 

Fascinating. I don't think I've ever actually tried that. The regen shouldn't stack THAT fast; it's only a 10% chance per hit. Even surrounded and getting hit by every enemy every round, that's still only a 41% chance of getting a regen proc on any given round. Given that each proc lasts 5 rounds and restores 2 HP per round, that's an average of

Code:

Round   avg HP gain
1                 0.94
2                 1.88
3                 2.82
4                 3.76
5                 4.7
6+                4.7               

If you're taking 15 damage per hit and getting hit 4 times (60 damage), Mt. Self is taking out, on average, just about 8% of the total damage you're taking. Which is in line with the intended result.

 

For me, if several floors in a row are ridiculously easy, it's difficult for me to remain interested in the character / playthrough. I need some challenge. I only started enjoying the character during the first monster zoo, during which I willingly did a bunch of melee combat to test his limits, rather than kiting and throwing which was proving too easy.

 

Oh no, it was 15 without jaws of death. With that applied, it was much less, and it wound up canceling out for the most part.