And does it work? Dredmorpedia doesn't give any info, and most of the time I try to use it, even when I attack on the proper turn, the buff does not go away and I overload and explode. Which does have the amusing side effect of blowing away every piece of wall around me, but still, I'd like to understand how I'm supposed to be using the skill to do something other than turn into a walking nuke.
When you use it, it starts charging. If you hit while it's charged, then you inflict grievous harm to monsters, if you don't hit at that time then it overcharge and becomes more dangerous to discharge. And the one about the buff not going away is a bug, or rather, an oversight on the part of its creator that resulted in this weirdness; it is supposed to go away when you hit something with it, but right now the "go away" part can be resisted on a random magic resistance roll.
OK so it is bugged in a fairly major way then right now. I couldn't tell if skill procs like Spirit Conduit were interfering or something. Essence of Battle seems to be bugged as well, as no matter how much mana regen I have, it will only leave me at neutral regen at best, you cannot achieve positive mana regen with it. And the skill seems fairly worthless for such a mana hungry buff. I'm better off just stacking a few Lesser Syzygys. Manacalypse feels extremely weak for an 8th level capstone with that kind of regen timer on it too.
I don't see how would that make it bugged if the most you can regenerate naturally is 1 mana/health per turn, and Essence of Battle uses 1 mana per turn just to be there. It's just a power-hungry buff. Are you talking about the full version, or about the smaller one (that is triggered if you don't have Essence of Battle on you)?
Essence of Battle is intended to make clever players look hard for a way to Regen more than 1 Mp per turn. It's not that hard once you apply yourself. And I'm pretty sure Manacalypse does nothing outside of Essence of Battle. If it needs buffing, I'll wait for a couple of over people to say so and if they do, I'll report it to the GLGods
So the problem is that mana is capped to 1 regen a turn then? That's lame, I thought having a character with 15 mana regen would let me combine that buff with others. I don't understand why you would have a skill with a full mana usage per turn then, since you could combine 4/5 other buffs and still be getting natural regen and have better stats. I don't even have any other skills with buffs and I can stack Lesser Syzygy's and that's way better than the Empowered form. And why does the capstone skill say "Also, your Empowered form becomes significantly tougher and more Manaful"? It doesn't seem to effect it at all as far as I can tell? Anyway pretty disappointed in the class. I'd been trying, unsuccessfully, to make a battle mage before the update, but it doesn't feel like this helps much. Arcane Capacitor might help, but I don't know what it's damage formula is, and it's broken right now anyways.
The 'tougher and more manaful' is a relic from back in the day when Essence of Battle was a polymorph. It should be changed. The thing that Essence of Battle does that makes it so worthwhile is that it makes all of your Warlockery spells more powerful. Puissant Touch deals more damage. Mana Maille removes less MP when you get hit. Warlock's Challenge paralyzes the enemy for an extra turn. Chronomantic Twist gives you an extra turn of acting before it pops. and Manacalypse works. Basically, all of those abilities are better in a way that is easily worth +1 mana to their casting costs -- so as long as you keep spamming Warlock spells, Essence of Battle more than pays for itself.
Oh really? It should probably mention something to that effect, since all you really see is the buff, which isn't that great. I do think the buff should be flagged as removable though, as the only way to get rid of it otherwise is to run yourself out of mana. Or by using Manacalypse... which also gets rid of all your mana. Although I guess that makes it too easy if you can turn it on and off, so maybe make recasting the skill toggle it or something? I dunno, it's just annoying as is. Also is there any way to fix/hack Arcane Capacitor by editing the spellDB? Like adding a forced damage type that gets around the bug that causes it to not go away or something?
Fixing Arcane Capacitor is easy. Search the spellDB for "For You!". Find the <effect type=dot> that creates "No Arcane Charge For You!", and add the argument resistable="0" to it.
There is another bug with arcane capacitor. If you are overloading and you walk on a stack of corpses, the template effect triggers for EACH CORPSE UNDERNEATH YOU. The equivalent of being hit by say, oh, 23 bolts of mass destruction spells doom even with a very tanky character. Given that Puissant Veil, Chronomantic Twist, and this are all broken, Warlockery deserves some special attention from gaslamp.
That's an easy fix. The others are already fixed in-house and will be rolling out with the next release.
Just because the corpse-bug was mentioned here: Doe we really need to add "affectsCorpses="0"" into every spell with templates/targets? Just asking...
Sorry for the hijack, but I've just started dabbling in modding Dredmor myself. How can I tell if a template will target everything in the template area?
It's when spell with a template triggers spells that use "target" (or "targetcorpse", if we are talking about choosing only corpses) as its targeting option instead of "template" or "targetfloor".
