Come Bitch About Skills! [Skills Rebalance Brainstorming]

...player magic costs mana, and magic resist erases 100% of the damage of many spells. Especially those that rely on DoT.

 

Mana is one of the biggest jokes in DoD. Find me a player who had trouble with it after DL3. Also, catching fire is hands down the best DoT in the game, can't be resisted and is almost exclusively the realm of magic. No, neither one of those is a particularly compelling counter-argument.

 

Any buff-based gish does.


That many buffs means every six hits, I need to recast three of them. Another two are hungry (one at 1:6, and one at a staggering 1:1), and I actually am not running another 1:4 hungry buff or a 10-attack buff that I could be. Mana is a real issue, and I have far more than enough mana regen to get 1 per turn.

 

Skills:

(Theory around weapon skills): Halve base bonuses. Apply base bonuses again on a buff, i.e. 1.5x as strong as currently single wielding, same as normal dual wielding.

Warrior:
Shield Bearer/Master of Arms could do with some kind of mechanism to make them good on people who use heavy armor. The Kronghammer has *28* AA with none of those skills. None. Not one. I wouldn't want or need more.

Wizard:
Astrology: The one thing that wouldn't be a bad idea: (Read, very good idea) would be to buff up Celestial Aegis so that it doesn't get knocked off by being hit. It feels bad to use if it doesn't flat out make you immune to enemy attacks.

Blood Magic: This needs level up incentives SO much.

Rogue:
Demonology: Half needs a rework. First half is great, then it begins to fall apart. Could do with more focus - is it meant to be for making you burlier through CC, or do you want to go demon-mode. Most people don't want to go demon - give a reason to do so.

Werediggle: Polymorph mechanisms just aren't great IMO. Losing 6 skills for 1 line is crazy, no matter how good that line is. Werediggle could really use a revamp, but I think it'd need to be GLG side and based on poly not removing other skills unless tagged to do so (or the other way around, a tag that made poly not lose other skills) so that when you pick Werediggle you don't feel terrible.

 

I like the fact that polymorph makes you lose your other skill bonuses. It's an interesting challenge to work around. I do agree with you that more incentive needs to be applied.

I've thought of one! How about - you completely heal HP when you transform into diggle-form? That actually sounds bad-ass, and even makes sense thematically.

 

i personally think wherediggle should give you SOME effects from your over skill trees, maybe 1/5 of the bonuses or something
I also believe a good method of fixing up some of the over powers would be if gaslamp added level limitations to skills
so you cant go straight down burglary to steal one of the best items from a shop on the first floor by level 5 or whatever.

 

Regardless - why would you spend 8 levels on something that's only up for limited time intervals and ruins your other 6 skills. I know when I've played Werediggle, I rely on using trees like Smithing, Alchemy, War Weaver that I can set up before I shift - it limits options and often makes it counterintuitive to do anything but ignore the tree or rush it all the way.

 

Brittle buffs are, IMO, horrid. If I could work my will I'd double all of the ones from mundane skill lines and remove them from magic skill lines entirely. Granted that Warlocky being a canonical skill does created a very challenging mana management situation, but we can't balance mana management around one skill at the far extreme of the game, just like how no-one balances necro resist around Necronomiceconomics.

The vast majority of mages don't run enough buffs to demand recasting turn after turn and/or abandond the lower level ones because they're not worth the hassle. I know that I wouldn't be running Radiant Aura after DL 5 unless I really wanted the Radiance damage. If that was my gameplan, it's still totally possible to build for it. And buffs don't run the risk of being resisted, which was the primary concern of the post that started all this.

 

Add an assassin skill that does lots of extra damage to sleeping targets perhaps? An instant crit on them maybe? Just a thought.

 

Depressing Elemental Blast seems really crap to me. Maybe I'm missing the point but this thing needs help STAT.

 

Sleeping is not a detectable status, unfortunately. In fact, most statii aren't. Also, "player does extra damage when invisible" is also un-doable because any attack="1" ability called from within invis automatically breaks invis.

 

... Lots and lots of my characters do in fact have problems with mana on 4 and below. There is only so much booze on a level, mana needs to be conserved and melee used where you can get away with it instead.

Also compared to the fixed damages of things like Arctic Vortex and Curse of the Golden Ratio, the 1% a turn reduction from being on fire is the real joke here. You're going to need to be verrrry deep in and verrrrry bad at using magic for "On Fire!" to be superior to any of the resistable DoTs you have access to. Anyway, there are also plenty of ways to set things on fire without using spells, especially if you are a tinker. Or, you know, the burning tome.

 

I guess I've just never found it that hard to get mana with the insane Thaumaturgical Tap hanging there on Leylines L2 and Trancedental there in Magic Training for later levels. I never even build with Blood Mage any more, Alchemy is more useful in my experience.

 

alchemyyyyyyyyy

 

Sorry for the grammer nazi but this really bugged me, the proper plural is statuses not stati (or statii which would in this case be the plural for statius).

 

If you have Alchemy, Fungal Arts, Blood Magic, or Ley Walker, mana is indeed easy to come by. With magic training it is less of a problem at first and then gets easy to come by later. You do not neccessarily have any of these things though.

 

For the love of god, Null, did I spit in your coffee or something?

 

If not, you may want to consider it.

 

Context of my above posts was Magic Training, so I kinda assumed it was implied... o_o;

 

Oooh that's right! Fair enough. You said spellcasters in general though. I generally find them harder than melee or rogues, not otherwise.