So, I've been reading up on Gog's Tactical Pyre and Pyrokenisis...but it doesn't match what I'm seeing in game. According to one wiki Pyrokenisis does 3 + 75% of magical power, and causes 24 turns of fire on the floor that does 8 damage/turn (Dredmorpedia says 6/turn for the fire on the floor, but otherwise gives the same formulas for both skills). Gog's Tactical Pyre on the other hand, is listed as doing 8 + 45% of magical power per turn to any monster standing on it. Currently, I'm sitting at 43 magical power, so I'd expect 3 + floor(43*.75) = 35 damage from Pyrokinesis (even if we assume the 8 damage from the floor fire doesn't proc the first turn), and I'd expect 8 + floor(43*.45) = 27 damage from Gog's Tactical Pyre. That seems moderately well balanced, since you can expect Gog's to do more damage if it damages more than once, while Pyrokenisis is a better skill when you must kill the enemy this turn. Both have identical mana cost of 5 with my level 17 wizard (55 Savvy, 43 power). However, I'm clearly seeing much more damage on the first turn from Gog's than from Pyrokenisis...possibly double the intended damage. Are these formlas correct? Is there a bug (or deliberate but clearly imba feature) that's making Gog's do double damage on the first round?
Sadly, all the wikis are currently out of date. Dredmorpedia pulls information directly from the game files, but I believe it is one patch behind the current build. The best way to be sure is to look in the files on your computer. The spellDB is the file you should check in this case. You should still start with the Dredmorpedia, but make sure the values it shows match what is currently in use by the skillDB and spellDB files. They are XML files.
Gog's Tactical Pyre hits twice when you cast it directly on an enemy: once when you cast it, and once when they step out of the spell mine the next turn.
They are different flames. Pyrokinesis' flame is a mere flame effect, while Gog's Tactical Pyre's one is the very same effect it started with, since it's a non-vanishing mine.
That's what I'm saying. The Pyrokinesis flamefield's damage can mostly be ignored because it's so low, but the Pyre is dealing two hits, guaranteed, whenever you cast directly on an enemy.
So...due to the double hit, Gog's Tactical Pyre is doing roughly 16 + 90% of magical power on the first turn...plus a mine that does 8 + 45% on subsequent turns. Since it's dealt in two separate hits, enemies get to use double their fire resistance against that first turn damage, and the 90% is rounded down to the next even number, but that's still pretty powerful. Meanwhile, Pyrokinesis is doing 3 + 75%, with a much weaker "Fire 1" mine dealing 6/turn, for a total (assuming the double hit effect also applies to Fire 1) of 15 + 75%, with enemies getting up to triple their resistances applied, since it comes as three hits. It has a lower maximum mana cost, but it's not hard to get both it and Gog's to the same minimum cost of 5 mana. So...Does that make them imbalanced? Just comparing the two skills, it seems like you'd never want to use Pyrokenisis if you have both, which feels a bit wrong to me: every skill should have some corner case where it'd be useful. (I suppose that you could argue that, in the case of low Sagacity, Pyrokinesis would be better...but it's almost impossible to not get enough Savvy to push them both to the minimum cost if you're playing a pure mage or rogue mage: it takes 40 Savvy to push Gog's to 5 mana. I have 55 Savvy, including two from gear, and nine from Magic Training. Without any gear or Magic Training, I'd be at 44 Savvy, meaning I could have dropped MT, taken four more warrior skill levels (for a total of six) and still been at minimum mana cost at character level 17.) That said, there are plenty of throw-away skills that almost never get used...if Pyrokinesis is a throw-away skill that's not worth using, what's the big pay-off skill for investing in Psionics? So far, only Crystal Healing feels like it's worth its skill slot as the safest, if slowest, healing skill...is Nerve Staple worth using? Or is Unconditional Love going to be worth all the throw-away skills that come before it?
Pyrokinesis is worth it if you don't have a better blaster spell (or have a big nuke spell that can kill you, like anything out of necronomiconomics). Gog's tactical pyre is better than pyrokinesis because it's the penultimate skill in a fire magic tree. Compare to psionics, where it's a "thing you can do with psi", but not what psi is all about.
Nerve Staple is pretty useful for existential damage on single targets. Few enemies resist it and one casting does decent damage. Only problem is they get a buff to existential resist, which stacks the more times you hit them with the spell. Depending on your magic power you have 2, maybe 3 uses out of it before it becomes useless on a particular target. Unconditional Love is a bit iffy but can be useful if you want to try getting a temporary guardian. Most of the rest of the tree is sadly underpowered though compared to the likes of Promethean, Necroeconomics, and Astrology.
Yeah, Psionics is not really a focused damage-dealing tree. Pyrokinesis is useful as a damage spell in a tree that otherwise gives few, if any, good damage outlets, but of course it gets outclassed by Promethean's spells, since Promethean Magic is basically an entire skill devoted to damage. That said, Psionics gets lots of good utility spells - shove is a lifesaver, as well as a great secret wall opener and trap mover, crystal healing is a magic heal, which is always useful, and nerve staple's primary use is the fact that it paralyzes an enemy, not its (relatively meager and unspammable) damage. Staple is particularly strong when used with the Tactical Pyre - there are very few problems which cannot be solved by stapling an enemy inside a pyre and letting them get hit four or five times.
