Essential DoD Skills I and II Finally Game-Ready!

Well, the difference is hard to spot, and requires some insane logic (aka. IT guy's logic) to notice. Because you could see it if you noticed that stacked buffs don't refresh, and that stack with size of 1 is still a stack (and while the first one is easy to see if you used buffs in the game, the second one kind of requires one to be crazy enough.

 

Not sure if I should be posting here or the other thread. The version I've been using is this one.
Is updating to the version marked Beta in the other thread stable, or would it require me to retire the character I've got on floor 11?

Anyhow, feedback, though, admittedly for all I know you may have already addressed these issues in

I'm using Poisoneer and Ninjitsu on a character I've got to floor 11.

At this stage, Poisoneer feels rather under-powered, and Ninjitsu feels vastly over-powered. The first level of ninjitsu feels like it has had a bigger impact on my survival this far into the dungeon than the entire poisoneer tree. Which is a shame, because I really like the concept of poisoneer. Flavorwise, it's awesome. I want it to be better.

Poisoneer:
I suppose it's possible I'm not fleeing and teleporting enough to get full effect out of the poisoneer. If indeed I'm just impatient, or not a good enough player to get the full effect, there's nothing you can do about that.

However, I suspect instead the main issue is just how much toxic resist the monsters have, which I'd been unaware of till I did that big floor-by-floor analysis in the other thread. There is literally only one floor in the entire game that doesn't have any monsters with . Perhaps diversifying the damage to include a touch of or would help?

The first level, despite including a free melee attack, is rarely worth the time it takes switching it back in to my over-laden skill belt. I realize it's a first level so not supposed to be great, and that most wizard-tree first level abilities get dropped by the wayside in the mid-to-late game, but it feels odd having a rogue skill that's similarly abandoned. Feels like this could use a boost to the scaling factor of the damage to keep it relevant later in the game. This "flaw" may be specific to my build, because I've a ton of activated skills to choose from, so take this complaint with a grain of salt. It's just a data point on the graph.

It would be nice if the Neurotoxin did something a bit more noticeable. Because the buff doesn't tell me what it does, and you can't see the stats on the times when the debuff does get inflicted on a monster, it's really confusing. I can't ever make an informed decision about whether or not it's truly worth spending a turn in the middle of a zoo re-activating it or not, because I can't really ever see the results. This could be improved by either increasing the mechanical transparency (indicating the effects in the buff description) or by just adding a sound effect or more dramatic visual clue when the power triggers. As-is, I click on it between fights because in theory it does something and doesn't cost me anything but a click, but I have yet to experience a "boy, neurotoxin sure saved my bacon" moment. Even just having the main buff itself add +1 to all attacks would make it feel more effective without actually changing game balance at all... though it would require ammendments to the flavor text.

The level that poisons your thrown weapons is more noticeably useful, since they happen at range and over time. I's also very noticeable that the bonus damage is small enough it rarely changes how many attacks it takes to kill the target. Again, a boost to damage scaling might help, and probably wouldn't break balance at all.

Can't really comment about the anti-poison's usefullness. The particular combo of mods I'm using features so much food that boosts to slow heals are rarely needed. Maybe if I was on NTTG without RR it'd be a lot more vital.

Poison blood is conceptually awesome, but hard to use to full effect since it's an A-o-E around you. It's rare that you're surrounded on 3 or 4 sides (for maximum effect) yet none of the monsters have 10 or more . Again, maybe I'm just not teleporting enough, but the times where I have let myself get surrounded, had it trigger, and then jumped away, I've always still had to kill the monsters manually. Which, for an endcap proc, seems a little weaker than it should be.

Perhaps either neurotoxin or the endcap could add a debuff that gives the monsters negative ? That way once they've triggered, your other poison attacks are more effective on the same target?

Despite the lack of obvious killing power, I love the flavor/theme of it, and like the idea of a skill that compliments thrown mastery and teleports. The concept is so awesome, I want to use it in future builds, but it's just not got enough oomph right now. Maybe I need to go install a debacle of diggles so there's fewer poison-resisting monsters to face off against, then it might shine.

Hitting a character limit, so I'll cover ninjitsu in another post.

 

Ninjitsu:
Secret Sword is just too good. I've found this ability alone to be more useful then entire skill trees.

A glance at the other thread suggests you've trimmed back the spawn rate of the ninjato, which is definitely a step in the right direction. I literally had one spawn in the second room on my current character, and as you can imagine the 11 damage made the rest of the starting a total breeze. I get 2 to 3 of them per floor on average, which was great for extra cash early on, as well as allowing me to freely krong my main weapon at no risk until I eventually found a better weapon later.

However, I don't think the ninjato is the really unbalancing part of Secret Sword. I've been facing down RR's giant double-zoos with pretty much nothing but throwing knives and shurikens. My build has no other spell casting, so every booze I find turns into more throwing implements. It's significantly more than I could produce with smithing. It totally blows away any pretenses of "war of attrition" and makes me not care about thrown vending or any throwing weapons found on the ground that aren't area-effect. If I pick javelins or nzappa zaps, I just fisk them because they aren't worth another inventory space when I've got infinite shurikens.

On one hand, it's great that this makes throwing rogues such a viable build. On the other hand, it clearly warps the landscape and play balance of the game. Once this is installed, you'd never consider making a character that uses crafting or vending to supply their ranged attacks. It's also possibly a factor in my feeling poisoneer is under-powered, because why should I wait for the monsters to maybe die of poison when it costs me next-to-nothing to throw another 2 or 3 knives into them?

One possible fix would be shift it away from being a between-battles castable, to something you can only use when facing monsters. That way you couldn't stockpile the weapons as much. For example, you could turn it into an on-thrown proc that generates throwing weapons at the target space. It'd no longer be abusable with booze, and each individual weapon would feel a tiny bit more precious given that you could theoretically run out.

Moving on past Secret Sword now...

Genjutsu seems balanced when it works correctly, but I've had a couple times where the log failed to die, and then I had a several-hundred-HP bodyguard wandering around with me for a third of a level. Clearly that's a bug, but I'm not sure what's causing it. Late game it's no big deal, but early on that was very useful to hide behind.

The level with 11 points of dodge seems too much too soon. I don't think the tree as a whole gives too much dodge (being slightly behind Artful Dodger, which is could use some love), but what it gives is front-loaded in a low-hanging fruit that takes no effort to achieve. This would be less of an issue if the first level wasn't insanely good and the second not a situational life-saver, but as it is, this tree just makes the early game incredibly easy to get started with. I could totally see myself taking this as a support skill for a melee build for whom throwing was an afterthought and mana regen was going to be wrecked by armor. That +11 dodge for 3 levels is very tempting.

Taijutsu is kind of like Neurotoxin. I turn it on before fights because I know it does something. Telling exactly what it does, however, is really hard. Which means that if mana is tight and thus I have to choose between it and maintaining my infinite supply of thrown items, I'll prioritize the secret sword. Which is weird, given that the description claims it kicks ass. It's not following through with the flashiness that the description suggests. I see that you've revised it in the compleat package, so I may be pointing out flaws that no longer exist. If so, my apologies.

The final level is very potent and fitting of an end-cap, but also kind of falls victim to the same "everything is mysterious" problem that makes it hard to appreciate Neurotoxin and Taijutsu. There's a variety of procs happening, but I can honestly only identify two of them. Brrr and the summoning of the magic golem. I'm unaware of whatever else it's doing. Since it's automatic and not something I have to choose to activate, this is far less of an issue than with the other two powers, but it's a niggling annoyance that is made more so by the other two powers that have the same cloak of secrecy. To some extent this is not your fault, and merely a function of the game not featuring a convenient way to check the stats of a debuff the player has inflicted on the enemy.

Brrr has a weird bug that's causing the effects to not display correctly whenever I manage to debuff myself with it (by throwing at an adjacent target). The three modifiers are overlapped so I can't read their values.


The most important parts (from both posts) in summation:

• Poisoneer has great flavor and concept, but needs some added mechanical oomph.
• Secret Sword could use some serious scaling back because it breaks too many main-game dynamics.
• Neurotoxin, Taijutsu, and maybe Kuji Kuri could use some de-mystification.
• Ninjitsu is a lot of fun, despite (or because of) being way over-powered.
• Poisoneer would feel stronger if ninjitsu didn't overshadow it so much.

 

Thank you, r_b. That was some of the best feedback I've gotten on Poisoneer, and I really appreciate it.

I haven't actually playtested the new Poisoneer at deeper levels, but it scales to EDR, which (if you realize that it does), is pretty easy for a Rogue to maximize and take good advantage of. The new Neurotoxin simply adds Nerve Staple on critical hits (the old one added Nerve Staple on 20% of your hits when the buff was active.) I'm totally doing that - on the endcap thing, though.

Ninjitsu's biggest change in the new version is that Secret Sword conjures less high-end ammo AND costs twice as much, which I think goes a long way toward toning it down, especially in the early game. Oh, and the entire structure of the skill tree was rewritten; Taijutsu is just a plain proc instead of a buff that requires upekeep (and it only goes off on critical hits), and it has a new endcap skill. I'm pretty sure you'd break your save if you switched over in mid-game (adding skill levels tends to do that), but when you start a new one, I'd highly encourage you to upgrade.

 

You should go poke Daynab about having the mod index point to Compleat instead of the old ones.

 

He'll do that once it's out of Beta, which should be in early May.

 

Honestly I do not see what is so "Beta" about Compleat Essential Skills. It seems perfectly stable and well polished. Some may cry foul and say some of the skills are OP, but they do not have to use it at all.

 

Well, "beta" means that it's not final release and some minor (more or less) changes will be done to it later.
Beta versions don't necessarily have bugs, it's just that, in most cases, beta versions of various things introduce new stuff that is yet to be tested, so they mark it as "beta" to say "hey, this version could work weirdly and some things can be changed in the future, so be careful".

 

Exactly. It'll be beta at least until Warlockery and Ninjitsu work properly, which is waiting on the next release from Gaslamp.

 

Just what I thought, then.

Yeah, thanks to the incoming stuff in the code I don't even try to release my stuff (not that I have enough time for that now, either way) - it's just too tempting not to use the new functions (or however you want to call those bits of code, I'm too tired to care).

 

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, since I don't have the patience to read all of this huge thread, but vorpality seems to be working incorrectly. I've no idea if the crit bonus is being applied correctly but the negatives to damage certainly aren't. My damage is unaffected no matter what weapon I'm using. Hope this helps.

 

I'd like to note for the record that I've done several throwing builds revolving around crafting, without ninjutsu, despite having it installed. And they've arguably been stronger than the ninjutsu fueled one.

 

http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/the-compleat-essential-skills.2811/page-14#post-40170