OK, with Degree in Dungeoneering down pretty pat on paper, it's time for me to return to a promise I made back in January when drinkBuffs were first announced: drunken boxing. This is my brainstorming space. Please feel free to throw in any ideas you have. 1) drunken stance -- a drinkBuff that lasts until removed, until you eat food, or until you adopt another stance (from this skill or from Kung Fu; this stance will also end all Kung Fu stances) 2) drunken celestial fire surround -- a drinkBuff that triggers a half-strength Infernal Torus that scales on Caddishness. 3) staggerstep -- a removable buff that, while active, has a 50% chance to teleport you one square in any direction at the end of each turn. Knocks back anything in your area and deals attack damage to it as well. 4) ritual of the consumption of the alcohol of the treestuff -- gives massive (i.e. ~8-point) static bonuses to Dodge and Critical, but debuffs your vision radius by 2. yes, permanently. It's freaking wood alcohol! Any other ideas?
Just to mention: vision debuffs really don't work in skills as it is, whether using the stat or visionbuff you'll end up not being able to decrease the vision radius past five and it ends up causing weird glitches like your sight radius being permanently locked at 7 total, ignoring changes to the stat and even polymorphing.
Would it not make more sense to have your fluctuate a bit in place of being permanently reduced? I do not know how to script it, but it may make sense to have it reduce by a random number between 1 and 3 every turn. The effect would not be a visible debuff but would be rerolled every other turn. (With a duration of two turns each time.) I say every other turn and lasting two turns because I remember something about buffs and debuffs having issues with one turn durations. And it may make more sense to have the and rolled at the same time for somewhere between 6 and 10 each. When under the effect of alcohols, little is certain, except uncertainty.
Staggerstep sounds like a lot of fun. The whole skill does, honestly. The idea of doing drinkbuffs on a class that doesn't do much with mana is very interesting to me. Ideally, it should be viable on either a warrior or a melee-wizard build. I could see someone taking this + alchemy or burglary (they being ways to get a little more booze than normal). Can you think of any possible powers that might add more synergy with those two skills? How about a level that gives you a small amount of xp every time you drink booze? To encourage the constant consumption, instead of hoarding, of liquor? Staggerstep and Drunken Celestial Surround both encourage wading into zoos and hordes. I'd look for mechanics that further that notion. As omninegro suggested, I'd look at short-term random-length defensive buffs (things with counter buff and dodge buff inside them if that works) that trigger when you drink. Make sure each individual buff does not stack. That way the optimal way to play is to stand next to the foes and drink booze every 3rd or 4th action, as opposed to just spamming the booze (and also instead of drinking once at the start of a fight and using normal attacks thereafter). Activated abilities that require drunken stance to be up first might be nice. Or activated abilities that are stronger when drunken stance is up. I haven't tried your kung fu yet, so I'm not sure exactly how it works. You may have already intended this sort of thing.
Is it possible to base a modifier referring to how many turns of Fueled By Booze you have available? Eg, Whitey the Wino, has 50 turns of Fueled By Booze, so an attack called Punch Drunk Love does more damage based off that. Something to encourage overspending on booze.
Sadly, no. I'd love it to be, but it's not useful enough on a broad scale to bug Nicholas about it, methinks.
Not really, but it would be possible (when we get the "requirebuffontrigger" thing) to add a "boozeBuff" (or however that is called) that would give you a dummy ability for some time when you drink some booze (and perhaps give you an activated ability that would give you the same buff by itself but has a cooldown that makes using booze preferable), and make all of the activated abilities require that buff and remove 1 (or more) of that buff. But then again, that's a pretty cruddy solution.
OK, here's my revised ideas: 1) Drunken Stance. Boozebuff. Puts you in Drunken Stance. (Imagine it's "Drunken Batty Stance" or whatnot if you're also using Kung Fu.) Drunken Stance gives you -4 Melee Power, +20 Crit Chance, +10 Counter Chance, and +10 Dodge. 2) Kung Fu Chaser. Another Boozebuff. Only triggers if you already have Fuelled By Booze. Removes Fuelled By Booze. Gives you a 7-turn buff that grants +13 Health Regen, +5 Crit, +5 Counter, +10 Dodge, and +4 Blasting Damage. 3) Staggerstep. Activated buff. As long as Staggerstep is activated, at the end of any turn on which you hit a foe or were hit by a foe, you teleport 1 random square in any direction, dealing attack damage and knocking back the target in that square. 4) Arbitrarily Long-Titled Zany Drunken Martial Arts Technique. Activated ability. Requires Drunken Stance or nothing happens. Deals attack damage. Inflicts -100 Magic Resist for 1 turn. Then triggersfromlist a variety of different effects, including knockback, blind, paralyze, root, and a dot. 5) Drunken Celestial Fire Surround. Boozebuff. Every time you drink, everything in a 2-square straight line in all four directions gets hit for 16 Fire (.2F/caddishness) and 2 Aethereal (.2 F/Magic Power). 6) Inebriate Uber-Combo. Boozebuff. Requires Kung Fu Chaser or nothing happens. Removes Kung Fu Chaser. 5-turn buff. -8 Melee Power, but <multibuff="3">. Powerful, but if you're not already set up it can take up to 3 turns to activate. Thoughts?
OK. I'll turn down the stat boosts on Drunken Stance. I'm not sure what you mean re: Fuelled by Booze. Are you saying that removing the Fuelled by Booze buff doesn't remove the related DoT that procs +1 mana/turn on you? If thatt's the case, I'll poke Nicholas about it. Regardless, the real point here is that you have to have already drank something recently in order to use it, not that it steals your mana-gain away, so I'll regard it as 'ok' for now. Don't forget that Drunken Celestial Fire Surround does have the cost of "one skill level". Is it too powerful for what it does given that you could otherwise be taking, for example, Obvious Fireball or Pact of Fleeting Life? As to reducing the multibuff and making duration longer on Inebriate Uber-Combo, I have no issues with that. Post revised.
Just thinking out loud how this would work in an Wizard build with Alchemy. You'd have constant booze. You wouldn't care much about the loss of Melee Power. You'd take the first 5 levels but possibly not the 6th. Drinking booze mid-battle then isn't a wasted turn, but instead scores you a free area-attack, plus a free heal, plus a big boost to your dodge, plus the mana from the booze. Umm, that's starting to sound pretty broken. I guess I'd been hoping this would be more of a skill that gives a warrior a reason to care about all the booze in the dungeon, as opposed to a skill that's really meant for wizards. It may be that I'd completely misunderstood your initial design goals. I'd love to see levels 3 and 6 give debuffs to your magic power and magic regen. It wouldn't stop a wizard from taking levels 1 to 5 since they'd still be able to turn off level 3, but it would make the tree play differently for a warrior or rogue than a wizard. Lots of math follows. I won't be offended if anyone chooses to skip down to the "My Advice Would Be" section at the bottom. Obvious Fireball: Costs you 18 to 8 mana. Does 11 base damage, plus .7 scalar (though that's split between 4 much smaller damage effects, so a monster with good fire resist will ignore it better than that implies). Pact of Fleeting Life: Costs you 11 to 4 mana. Deals necropain (1 + .1 scalar) to you for 15 turns. +3 burl +13 hp for 16 turns, then changes to +2 burl, +11 hp, -2 melee power, -2 health regen. Does 1 base damage, plus .65 scalar. Heals you equal to the damage that isn't resisted. Drunken Celestial Surround: Costs zero mana, but does require a booze. That booze triggers various buffs, and gives you mana for your other spells. Does 18 base damage, plus .2 scalar. Its almost apples and oranges, not to mention a little abstract. My head is swimming. Let's look at something more concrete... The "Sauna" level is the first Floor where you encounter monsters with . Thermoblobby has 4, and Living Statue has 10. IIRC, you're usually around character level 10 when you first find them, so assume Sagacity of around 30 or so with a focused-build, right? Caddishness will be a little lower on a wizard, probably around 24 or so if Drunken Boxing is the only warrior skill they have. Let's look at the fireball's effectiveness on that floor: The Thermo Blobby gets hit by Obvious Fireball. Sagacity 30 means Magic Power of about 15. Fire damage from the flame field effect is either 3 or 4 (not sure if game rounds up or down), so it gets resisted completely. Fire damage from the fireball effect is 5, so 1 gets through. Blasting damage from the fireball effect is also 5, and it all goes through. There's an additional 7 blasting damage if the thermoblobby was the very center of the Obvious Fireball. So total post-resist damage is 13 to the thermoblobby in the middle, and 6 to another adjacent thermoblobby. Against a monster with no fire resist (and still no armor), the damage would be a lot better. 20 to 21 damage total on the guy in the center, and 13 to 14 on the adjacent ones. Against the Living Statue (10 and 5 ) it's much worse. The statue takes just 2 damage total from the obvious fireball, and that only if he's hit dead center by the blast. Now you drink a booze. Celestial Surround blasts both thermoblobbies. They both take fire damage of 20 or 21 (not sure on the rounding) based on your Caddishness, and soak up 4 of it. The both take 5 Aetherial Damage as well. Total damage from Celestial Surround is 20 to 21 after resistances. Against the monster with no fire resist (and no armor) the damage is 25 to 26 total. Against the living statue damage is 15 to 16 total. Clearly, your proposed skill does a lot more damage than Obvious Fireball. Especially to creatures who, on paper, should be resistant to fire. Against thermoblobbies, the Celestial Surround is doing 160% the fireballs damage to one of them, and 350% the fireball's damage to the others. Against two or more monsters without resists or armor, Celestial Surround is doing 123% as much damage as the fireball to the guy that would have been in the middle of the fireball's blast, and 185% the fireball's damage to those adjacent to center. Against a Living Statue, the Celestial Surround is doing 800% of the damage the fireball would. Plus, it actually does damage to the second Living Statue, where as the statue laughs off the area effects of the fireball. All that extra damage, and you get mana and buffs for taking the action that did it. Celestial Surround is way better than Obvious Fireball in the mid-game. Scaling may invert that dynamic in the late-game, but how often do you get to the late game? To get to the late game you have to survive the early game, and clearly Celestial Surround makes it a lot easier to do that than Obvious Fireball does. Also, Promethean takes more building around. You need to make sure you're a wizard and not wearing heavy armor to get full use of it. Celestial Surround scales to Caddishness, which never gets penalized by armor, and goes up 2 with every level of warrior or rogue. My advice would be: Split up the fire damage into two packets, so gets applied twice. Set one for a 1-tile radius, that does 6 with no scaling. Set the other for 2-tile radius, doing 4 (.2 F/Caddishness) and 2 (.2 F/Magic Power). Net result is damage more in-line with Obvious Fireball, and preserves intended monster resistance levels. The slightly less potent area-effect won't allow you to wade into zoos quite as aggressively, and will be a lot less appealing to squishy wizards on the first floor or two. That's at least a good place to start. It may still need to be tweaked back a bit from that depending on how easy it is to keep the booze flowing, but at least it's no longer completely better than the equivalent level of one of the best damage-dealing skill trees in the game.
You only have one single Fuelled by Booze buff at any given time. If you remove it you have zero buffs and then at the end of the turn you gain one mana and have one buff.
Nono, I mean you have a DOT requirebuffnotontrigger check for a Fuelled by Booze buff: when you don't have Fuelled by Booze, it uses removebuffbyname to get rid of your other buff.
Well yes, I would use that to limit it to the duration, but it still doesn't make it scale with the number of buffs without some other hackery.
OK, revised again. Plz more feedback plz: 1) Drunken Stance. Boozebuff. Puts you in Drunken Stance. (Imagine it's "Drunken Batty Stance" or whatnot if you're also using Kung Fu.) Drunken Stance gives you -4 Melee Power, +20 Crit Chance, +10 Counter Chance, and +10 Dodge. 2) Kung Fu Chaser. Another Boozebuff. Only triggers if you already have Fuelled By Booze. Gives you a buff that lasts indefinitely BUT has a 9% chance of dropping any time you get hit AND constantly checks for Fuelled By Booze and removes itself if FBB ends (this gives Drunken Masters a good reason to care about higher-level vs. lower-level booze.). that grants +13 Health Regen, +5 Crit, +5 Counter, +10 Dodge, and +4 Blasting Damage. 3) Staggerstep. Activated buff. As long as Staggerstep is activated, at the end of any turn on which you hit a foe or were hit by a foe, you teleport 1 random square in any direction, dealing attack damage and knocking back the target in that square. Staggerstep also inflicts a -20 Magic Power penalty while active, as you're clearly...umm...redirecting your...essential energy...uhh...into your feet! 4) Arbitrarily Long-Titled Zany Drunken Martial Arts Technique. Activated ability. Requires Drunken Stance or nothing happens. Deals attack damage. Inflicts -100 Magic Resist for 1 turn. Then triggersfromlist a variety of different effects, including knockback, blind, paralyze, root, and a dot. This level also gives you 6XP every time you drink booze. 5) Drunken Celestial Fire Surround. Boozebuff. Every time you drink, everything immediately adjacent to you gets hit for 9 Fire (no scaling) plus 2 Aethereal (no scaling). Then everything in a 2-square straight line in each direction from you gets hit for 6 Fire (.3F/Caddishness) plus 1 Aethereal ( .2 F/Magic Power ). In case anyone doesn't follow, that's XXXXX XX#XX X#@#X XX#XX XXXXX followed by XX#XX XX#XX ##@## XX#XX XX#XX This also drains you of 50% of your Mana. 6) Inebriate Uber-Combo. Boozebuff. Requires Kung Fu Chaser or nothing happens. Removes Kung Fu Chaser. Has the same duration as Kung Fu Chaser (i.e. 9% removal chance, ends when FBB ends.) -8 Melee Power, but <multibuff="3">. Powerful, but if you're not already set up it can take up to 3 turns to activate.
That's definitely an improvement (meaning "better balanced"). I also like that it's more definitively a skill for warriors now, and not something that automatically improves any wizard build. Was the original version of celestial fire surround also a cross-shaped pattern? If so, I'd misread it, and thought it was a 5x5 square centered on the caster. So it may not have been nearly as large an area as I'd imagined. It was too much damage in a single packet, though, so I'm glad to see it revised, regardless of what the original template actually was. Your new version is a lot more respectful towards monster resistance formulas, as well as just better balanced all around. Very nice. Not sure I can give you more feedback until I see it in action. Which won't be any time soon, since there's no Mac version of the DLC (and thus no working boozebuffs for me). Sorry.
Hey there, I'm currently working on a drunken boxing mod myself (it is my first ever mod) but I have this one problem. Im trying to make a buff that lasts as long as the Fuelled by Booze buff but I just simply cant make the Fuelled by Booze buff trigger anything or do anything. I cant even remove the buff like you did with photosynthesis. Shouldnt it trigger something if I use requirebuffontrigername="Fuelled by Booze"? I just dont know what else I can do to make it work and Id be thankfull for any help.
