Yeah, the number of Pokemon references does decrease pretty massively with time. Since it did start as a Pokemon mod and only later got changed into something less trauma-inducing.
I quite enjoyed RR even when it was overfilled with Pokestuff. I rarely got the reference, and although I knew I could probably search to find what it meant, it was fun as it was. I too thought "Sirtus" was just a reference to citrus. Oh well. The egg is a nice idea. I laughed the first time I simply had to do it. Like Kazeto said, 90% of the game and mods are references to other things. A mod need not be entirely original to be loved by all. (Although I do like it better without so much Pokestuff. Thank you again for that change.)
Tone down the Mana Hunter's magic resist. Wizards who can fling things that do lots of damage (Rune of Exploding, Gog's Tactical Pyre) generally have the means to overcome it, so unless they use something like (unbalanced, uber-overpowered?) Viking Magic and rely on DoTs, it hardly gets in their way too much. On the other hand, it does make things really annoying for vegans. It also impedes the use of some rogue skills like Poisoneer.
I'm not quite sure I follow you, could you please explain again? From what I understand,the complaint is that promethean and necro still do enough damage through the to kill them, but DoTs from viking and mathemagic don't and that I'm unfairly penalising DoTs. The proposed solution is to drop , and I'm not too sure how that follows. But I'll reply as far as I understand things: The highest a base-game monster has on that level is 10, from the witchy.The mana hunter, on the other hand, has 37. One of the possible solutions would be to drop some of the and make it up with specific resistances like and , but that would also decrease damage from melee sources, which would go against the grain of the monster. I wanted a monster that was more troublesome for mages to kill as opposed to melee; it's sort of like you CAN melee a corrupting monster into submission, but it's not really the most efficient way to go about things. The problem with DoTs is more, well, itself than anything; while I agree with you that a resist on the first cast shouldn't mean the whole DoT damage being wiped out, that's more a problem with the main game and happens everywhere. I don't think players should be trying DoTs anyways - the intended way for mages to deal with these monsters would either be to use bolts, bombs, or just wade into melee with staff skill as a last resort - mana hunters' negative value means they should be taking 6 more damage per hit than normal. Additional poison damage from, say, poisoneer (most of my rogue builds do inclde the skill for Neurotoxin), shouldn't count for too much compared with the bonus damage from negative armour, and if you're a vegan, they shouldn't be attacking you in the first place. I see what you mean - the mana hunter's considered to be troublesome, but not impossible to strong-arm into submission (assuming you don't get thaumic/mana drained dry first); this is because I feel that by DL5, the wizard player may not have had enough points put into rogue support skills, or had the opportunity to gather enough alternative resources (crossbows, bolts, bombs, etc) to deal with them. Sure, it may not completely save them from death, but they're not dead on sight like most of the other monsters on the level with a promethean build, and have a chance to fire off a thaumic or mana drain to stall the mage player and allow other monsters to close in while the mage replenishes reserves. By level 13, I can assume that the player's options are far more varied, leading to me being comfortable giving Radiant Wyrms a total of 72 and 50. It's the same reason I didn't make dragon whelps fully resistant to , but just enough to give prometheans a bit of a harder time while starting out. I'll take note of this, and adjust the Mana Hunter's negative value accordingly if need be. I don't know, am I missing something from your explanation? What do you think? Someone else want to weigh in?
Well sometimes they do because of a bug but really the problem is more that vegans need to be able to kill animals to do things like complete quests. Or move.
Attack from range/use a summoned creature/just purge yourself after the task is done. Quests from Inconsequentia are a gamble, so while this isn't exactly fair if you get an animal to kill, it's not like you can't manage to do that if you know how to. A teleport skill should fix that pretty easily.
The problem isn't that it's impossible. The problem is that it's tedious, and the vegan charming of animals can be resisted as well. Tedium just isn't fun. Magic Resistance as implemented right now just isn't mechanically very fun.
^Vegan and Vampirism are the bane of my existence. I've lost more GRPD chars trying to make builds centering on either of those abilities work than with any other. Except radiant wizard, of course, but Radiant Wizard is for the terminally insane. Both Vegan and Vampirism are meant to be "functional" trees. Edit: Some constructive criticism on balance - Even as of the latest version, blood knight still seems to be a must have for any melee char. However, I don't think that dropping the numbers until everyone stops using it, then pushing it up again is the way to go. Right now, Blood knight guarantees you can walk out of most fights taking little to no damage. If you walk on a few traps between fights, or if the damage you took was on the high side, no problem, just eat one of the 1000 health items you've been stockpiling. Also, even at +3hp/level, the amount of hp the tree gives you still means that you as long as you drop your first 2 levels into the tree and skip activating armor, the passive +3hp from the tree almost nets you blood-price for free. At that point, you essentially have the all the benefits of vampirism (and then some - remember all the buffs those first two levels give you, even if you skip armor), without any of the disadvantages. This also generally puts your hp past the critical point of 30 hp (depending on what other abilities you are rocking), which is all you need to power your way through the first few levels of the dungeon. A few ways to off-set this 1) The way I see blood knight is as a "functional" Warrior-based vampire tree. The ORIGINAL vampires, not the ones that sparkle. As such, I think that removing the ability to eat food (but not the ability to regen hp passively, because blood knight already penalizes you through minus HP) might be a fair compromise for this tree, and still keep the flavor of the tree. 2) Remove the +3 hp from Tier 3 (because that doesn't cost anything in terms of hp), such that the tree only pays off for blood price without mitigating for Defender in any way, and generally tweak the numbers on Blood price down (I don't really like this, but if you're looking for a quick fix...) 3) Or, you could split the vamp effect between defender AND blood price. Overall, if you make it past stage 5-6, then you will still be more or less the same position you would be in terms of hp/sustain, but that forces you to walk the razor's edge for 1-2 more stages if you want the mad sustain rates. 4) One of the things I really liked about the original Blood Knight was the scaling on mage-power, because it finally allowed me (along with stuff from a few other mods) to go for a melee-range heavy caster build. Personally, I think Blood Knight is great not in-and-of itself, but because it makes playstyles that are difficult to pull off in vanilla viable. A great way to "nerf" the tree would be to split the regen between "health/magepower". That way, you limit the late game effectiveness of blood knight (without killing it) for pure warrior-types that typically stack hp and heavy armor, while still throwing a bone out for people who want to be creative with their playstyles. I see 1-2 working well together, assuming it can be done (Not too sure if the code for vampirism can be split into two, but if it can, that works) I think combining any two of the above should do the trick, even though i personally prefer 3+4
Thanks for stopping by and weighing in. I won't deny that blood price is a tad OP, and balancing it has been my main frustration from day one. Health is a much scarcer resource than mana, especially on GR, and that within lies the problem - make Blood Price too weak, and players won't use the activated abilities at all, make it too strong and players can just faceroll through the game. If you look at the Blood Knight thread proper, this one spell's undergone more mechanics overhauls than the rest of the tree combined. 1) Unfortunately, inability to eat food is hardcoded into Vampirism, I think, and even if it weren't, I don't want to step on vampirism's flavour too much. Again, referring to the above - if players can't get health to use, the whole idea of "casting from hp" behind the tree falls flat on its face. As-is, vampirism can barely hold its own against incoming damage even with drinker of the dead thrown into the mix, and even that is debatable - see Essence's rebalances to the tree against the current incarnation of Vampirism. I feel removing the ability to eat food and get natural regen would essentially discourage a lot of players psychologically from using any of the activated abilities. (Think of how hard it is right now to get 20 health with Vampirism, let alone 20 surplus hp). I toyed with the idea of nixing regeneration while blood price was up, but as Sniktch pointed out, natural regen during combat really doesn't amount to anything. 2) I agree. The health cushion will definitely be revisited once the triggers I'm waiting for come live; see below. I may reduce it even further if the health upkeep idea works. 3) The problem with splitting is that the game rounds down fractions during each step of calculation. While the amountFs may add up to the same, the results often don't when you're dealing with very small amounts. These things are usually best kept in one spell to keep things simple. I don't think it solves the problem of the overall drain being OP at its roots. 4) See the first solution below. Pact of fleeting life from necro scales with magic power; the flavour of blood knight is health, melee power, and a little crit, and I do want to keep that flavour. So far, I have a couple of possible solutions: *I could try giving Blood Price a mana upkeep, but I don't really like the idea - this is intended to be a pure warrior skill (as opposed to vampirism or necro), and previous versions used magic power only because all scaling was done to that (I'm one of the long-time supporters for other scaling factors for Vampirism). *What I'm truly waiting for is the addition of the requirebuffontrigger flag, so I can test out the idea of health upkeep. Take a gander at this code: Code: <spell name="Blood Draining" type="self" > <effect type="heal" amount="-1" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="Blood Draining" requirebuffontrigger="1" requirebuffontriggername="Blood Price Effect" amount="2" /> </spell> <spell name="Blood Healing" type="self" > <effect type="heal" amount="2" /> </spell> <!-- Effect of Blood Price vampirism. --> <spell name="Blood Drain" type="target" > <anim sprite="sprites/sfx/bloodsplatA/bloodsplatA" frames="4" framerate="60" centerEffect="0" sfx="fleshbore" /> <effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.02" taxa="Vegetable" secondaryScale="0" /> <effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.02" taxa="Construct" secondaryScale="0" /> <effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.02" taxa="Undead" secondaryScale="0" /> <effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.04" taxa="Demon" secondaryScale="0" /> <effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.04" taxa="Other" secondaryScale="0" /> <effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.04" taxa="Animal" secondaryScale="0" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="Blood Healing" /> <!-- You do want some sort of return on your investment, yes? --> </spell> <!-- Basic Blood Knight skill, designed to allow one to drain HP to fuel spells. Heal component is so that some sort of guaranteed return is expected. --> <spell name="Blood Price" downtime="8" type="adjacent" icon="skills/blood_knight/blood_price32.png" attack="1" wand="0"> <anim sfx="naughty"/> <effect type="trigger" spell="Blood Price Effect" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="Blood Draining" requirebuffontrigger="1" requirebuffontriggername="Blood Price Effect" amount="2" /> <description text="The runes on your weapon (or boot) have awakened. They tell you that life-force tastes distinctly like chocolate, or in the case of vegetables, just like cardboard."/> </spell> <spell name="Blood Price Effect" type="self" icon="skills/blood_knight/blood_price32.png" > <anim sprite="sprites/sfx/curse_hit/curse_hit" frames="6" framerate="100" sfx="naughty" centerEffect="1"/> <buff useTimer="0" removable="1" allowstacking="0" icon="skills/blood_knight/blood_price64.png" smallicon="skills/blood_knight/blood_price32.png" > <targetHitEffectBuff percentage="100" name="Blood Drain" /> </buff> <description text="The runes on your weapon (or boot) have awakened. They tell you that life-force tastes distinctly like chocolate, or in the case of vegetables, just like cardboard."/> </spell> Essentially, what this (hopefully) does is to create an upkeep in health for the Blood Price (at the rate of 1 health per 2 rounds, in this example.) If everything works right, the Blood Drain spell is a recursive effect that is broken when the blood price effect buff is removed, creating a health upkeep effect that can be tweaked to balance things out. This way, I can also remove the health penalty from blood price and better balance the health cushion I want to give the tree. I'm not sure that this is the most elegant solution, but it would encourage players to activate blood price only when needed, and then I can give it an appropriate cooldown to make sure they have to think a little before flipping on the switch.
Another approach would be for blood price to be a single, draining, AoE attack, perhaps? Or to make a common theme with Blood Knight being that you can make a net profit to HP if you hit a lot of enemies, with all the skills providing a drain. I have to sadly admit that I've recently dropped Rougish Renovation despite it being such an excellent mod. These balance issues do get in the way a bit, especially if you don't roll a character with top tier skills but still have to deal with the monsters designed to counter those characters. Blood Knight is a pretty big issue though, it pretty much instantly guarantees a build will survive down to floor 5 or so, just like Killer Vegan and like the old Fungal Arts. Radiant Wizard also could use some balance love actually. And then with the items. Getting a Blingy Fish on floor 1, for example, in a lost loot. I guess in the base game you can occassionally find the crownstar addendum in a fountain, but that doesn't seem to happen nearly as often. Plus the cake and pie everywhere.
I am doing a Radiant pure mage run now. I have already maxed that skill tree, and while it is nothing nice most of the time, that is purely because I am getting hit. Getting hit seems to be a bad idea. (Odd that.) That said, I do think the cooldown abilities really do not say mage at all. They say rogue. They say they are staring intently at a stopwatch to plunge a dagger in the back of the bid D at a specific time, despite you having mana to spare... But I do enjoy it nonetheless. If it gets better I may use it more, but I anticipate this current character is doomed like every other Radian Wizard I have made.
Kaidelong,Why are you unhappy with a free blingy fish? The Lost loot should only rarely spawn on floor 1, being as though it has a level of 13. For reference, the Deluxe Box has a level of 5, and the items you can get from there are better than the blingy fish by a factor of 40 times. You can get the Spear of Rot, the Dragon Fang, the two best spear class weapons I've seen in this mod. Not to mention a blingy fish only does 14 damage, therefor isn't a game breaker to find early. Especially on Going rogue, that will just make it somewhat easier. The mod may have some balance issues, but the items you can get early aren't going to break it unless you have sheer luck and get a Dragon fang. Which has like a 1/18 chance. I haven't seen anything really off. Unless I really missed something. Even the amount of pies as you pointed out, aren't really bad. Yes, you can find a good amount of them, and have a nice stack, but that healing isn't going to say you except slowly. 1 hp a turn.
Thanks for your feedback, it's much appreciated. I understand I'm not the best at balance, and especially with some items where there's no reference point of balance I can look at (such as for pants that are of level >10). I'm not sure the single-drain AoE would work perfectly, since players would just spam it whenever it was up. Nevertheless, I'm currently coding a spell as we speak to give it a go; with proper balancing, it may prove to be a good holdover until I can test out the health/mana upkeep versions. I've also increased the level on Sitrus Berry, as well as made pie special and craftoutput, so by rights pie should now never randomly spawn. Then again, deep omelettes do randomly spawn from time to time due to hiccups in the item generation, but it should lower the amount of pie one finds lying around. Cake should never randomly spawn - it's always been that way from day one, but sometimes it does due to said hiccup. Levels on all the grab bags except the Bolt Council Gift Hamper have also been increased, Lost Loot in particular is now 19. Due to the bugged wand and potion spawning I'm not sure how much of an effect it'll have in total, but I'm going to do a playthrough and see what I can get out of a single data point. If they're really spawning too much and too often, I may excise them completely from the mod, or just make them vendor trash items worth a lot of money. I'm sorry that the mana hunter/radiant wyrm line of monsters bothered you that much, but I also understand that not everyone is going to like every part of my mod. Nevertheless, I don't think I'm going to budge on this issue - the way I see it, there is currently no monster in the base game that is harder to kill as a wizard than by a warrior, and there are whole skill mods out there dedicated to solving the problem of quadratic wizards linear warriors. Even a mathemagician, viking wizard or emomancer isn't going to face the sheer number of problems melee faces simply trying to use their archetype - once a mage gets to 1/turn mana with the help of dual orbs and further boosted with savvy bonuses, they're pretty much unstoppable. I agree that DoTs shouldn't be completely nullified on a resist, but that's more a base game issue. No monster in the base game has reflect, and it only reflects missile spells. As far as I know, only mummies on floor 2 have a silence, and then it's a silencing cloud that all nearby monsters happily walk into to boot. With all the nonsense melee has to go through - counter-crit-crit, corruption, hungry and thirsty diggles stealing food and drink, a whole array of on-hit debuffs and the like, being peppered full of holes by chicken caster mobs while trying to close distance, inability to stand up to named mobs, whole floors where they can't use their archetype for fear of being corrupted, etc, etc, I think giving mages a little frustration is a good thing. Thanks for playing, though, and once again, I'm sorry that it didn't turn out well for you. Heh. I'll admit that I absolutely delight in the "tip of my toes" feeling when I play a RW build, especially on floors with invisible monsters. The knowledge that one serious mistake could cost me my run - it makes the game a lot more exciting for me, and was one of the reasons why I made RW the way it was. Toeing the thin red line, and knowing it's very thin; you want to know when to close in to use your RW spells, and when to use another school like Promethean or Psionics to soften them up first. Nevertheless, as I've said before, I've beaten GRPD Dredmor thrice now with a RW build, once post 1.0.10, so I still know it's doable. Odd, though, I got a complaint yesterday that RW was too OP. David, I think you mean the Kissy Fish. The Blingy Fish does 35 damage total. In any case, I've made pie special, increased the levels on a couple of foods and grab bags, let's see how it goes.
Even if I tagged all the rooms in the mod with nofood, it'd still spawn in the base game rooms. Unless I'm missing or forgot something?
Hmm. Ah, thanks. Although I probably won't end up using it for BK, I'll go monkey around with it. Learnt something new today.
Oh yes, now that you mention it, I did have an instance where I bought a blingy fish. For 243z, if memory serves. On Floor 1. I do not need to elaborate on that now, do i? I know, i've been using it from day 1. I have to say I admire your persistence, and all the effort that you, essence and co. have put into these mod packs are the main reason why I finally decided to do more than lurk in this forum. That's interesting - mostly I was trying to propose a way to rebalance it without changing the basic "permanent buff that drops maximum hp, but gives a drain attack" premise. If you are willing to review that to a buff that uses HP to upkeep, then we are looking at a completely different beast. As far as the coding goes, i think it should work, but having dabbled with modding for this game a bit, I know that mod that *should* work have a habit of "not working".
Blingy fish price fixed. Thanks, Allurlewts. Must've slipped my mind somewhere. Couple of new items upcoming in 0.43:
