Come Bitch About Skills! [Skills Rebalance Brainstorming]

I have a method! Kind of!
-Check for invis buffs (there's, what, like 3 or 4 in the main game? Maybe some issues with various mods) -Give massive bonus to (X, Y, Z)
-Trigger attack=1 spell
-???
-Things die.

 

Tried that. It clears first.

 

Why not just change the invisibility-granting spells so that they also gave you a brittle buff with one charge that increased your damage/critical/whatever and removed one instance of said buff after number of turns equal to its duration?

It's a pretty crude method (if won't work well if you used multiple invisibility-granting items/skills), but it works somewhat.

 

The capstone crafting skills should provide the recipe for their respective +1 craft ability items (kronghammer for smithing, inspiration for alchemy, etc).

 

Potion of Alchemical Inspiration is an unhidden recipe.

 

on that note, i'd like to see some of the mainstream potions, like midas, hyperborean, voltaic, etc be unhidden.

 

This. The inability to create Dire Empowerments or Lively Regenerations without wading through bookcases upon bookcases of Clockwerk Bolts of Complicated-As-Hell is annoying.

 

I know it's slightly off topic and I wish I could completely stay on topic but I haven't fiddled with the various skills as much as others have. Anyways, I was curious about the bookcases and how they gave recipies. I've noticed that sometimes I can get duplicate recipies. Is there any way to fix this on the modder side, or would GLG have to fix it by adjusting the code to give one random recipie that the player hasn't already obtained. (If not, I will test saving before grabbing the bookcases and see if I can change the recipe by reloading the game... assuming i can tear myself away from certain other games long enough.)

 

You can change the recipe if you reload because your character died. This happened to me when I got a smith recipe I was looking for, died, and then got some tinkerer thing that was useless on the the reload.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty sure getting the same recipe twice would only happen if you have the same recipe in the core game and in a mod. if you find yourself getting the same core recipe twice, report it as a bug.

 

I generally take the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to these sorts of things, so generally I'm not enthusiastic about these sorts of discussions.

Vampirism in particular is pretty massively underrated, especially since the buffs in 1.0.11 handily fixed its single biggest weakness. The main flaw is that tree doesn't really go anywhere: Corpse Drinker is a mandatory skill tax (fair enough, because the base ability is great), Sparkly Glamour is useful but not a priority, Psychic Vampire is totally optional utility that you may or may not need depending on build, Transylvation is pure gimmick. It could really use some extra skills at the end, nothing incredible but enough to make investing in the tree all the way a goal that you might conceivably want to pursue.

Werediggle also gets a bum rap, but its weird state of sort-of-sometimes being incompatible with certain skills is definitely unintuitive as hell. I really enjoy vampirism and werediggle because I like having skills that work fundamentally differently from others instead of just being different flavors of the same things, but werediggle might be a little bit too weird. Balancewise though I think it's pretty solid. There are enough trees that sync with it to make up a reasonable variety of builds, and it offers a hell of a lot to any build that can work around its idiosyncrasies. It could conceivably use some fiddling (some of the utility skills in the middle are pretty filler-y) but I really like it where it is.

The one spot where I do take issue with current skills is Master of Arms/Shield Bearer. They're redundant both with each other and with their stated purpose of being shield/heavy armor skills--they're still useful individually, but the best use for them is taking them instead of loading up on heavy defensive gear. My best suggestion is to gut Shield Bearer's passive bonuses and instead give it a million procs that trigger on successful blocks, to make it something that's useful when you already have loads of block.

I guess the only other minor quibble I'd have is that I'd really, really like to see Assassination's Venomous Infusion get turned into a ~20%ish attack proc. It's currently a buff with fairly decent duration and short cooldown so it gets really annoying having to refresh it all the time, and an attack proc would fit the mechanical theme of Assassination's other attacks.

 

Cool idea for Eye Lasers buff: First, a damage buff. Then, no cooldown or mana cost. Instead! Every time you use it, you lose 1 sight radius for 5 turns! Stackable up to a point, of course. That way you can hammer at an enemy over and over, but it gets weaker and weaker with every use.

 

Well it already does scale to sight radius.
And the duration would have to be longer than 5 turns because then it would actually have a restriction as you'd plummet your sight down to zero or so.

 

That would be an item rebalance, not a skills one.

 

Well it affects the crafting skill in question quite a bit balance-wise, while not in the slightest affecting the balance of those items.

 

If you're going to be replacing skillsdb.xml, you might as well branch out to craftdb.xml as well.

On that note, you could even modify soundfx.xml.

 

The first time I did this, I vowed to keep it down to just skillDB and spellDB, for simplicity's sake. What do y'all think? Better if I keep it simple, or should I try to tackle a General Essential Rebalance?

 

I vote that the 'mainstream potions' become available as you progress through the skill tree--using that one sneaky workaround (it should work for recipes) to grant multiple if needed.
I think someone might have said that before. Did someone say this before?

 

Generally speaking, items affect skills and are affected by skills too. Now, doing a complete rebalance if items is a tad too much, but I believe that changing recipes' status as hidden/unhidden does fall under "balancing crafting skills" which is something that belongs here too.