Topic. This is neat because the hungry aspect will still limit its use, but the player won't be able to keep it up indefinitely, as opposed to the real deal.
I don't think that this is necessary. I would like to see the # of hits for certain brittle effects extended, however.
I would like to see the # of hit of all brittle effect extended. Less than 10 hits on a brittle is just ridiculous.
Has anyone considered making some (probably not all) brittle buffs restore their charges periodically? This would gear them towards hit and run tactics and add some dimensions to things. Part of why I bring this up is the concern that some buffs aren't very useful, primarily the Lobstermane and Prince shroom buffs. Maybe I'm using them wrong, but it seems like others share this mentality given the desire to see brittle charges go up to 10+.
Impossible to do normally. Can be done using a workaround method, but doing it would be unproductive considering the amount of time we'd have to spend on it.
In general, brittle buffs (of the defensive kind) are ass. They are a 100% exponential power curve. You either take 0 damage before using it - and thus have no need of the buff - or take 1 damage, go to 0, and it's amazing. Or you go from 2 to 1, and the buff runs out fast, but was kind of worth it for the two or three turns it lasted. Or you go from 3 to 2, and you hardly care - but it's no worse than the 2-1, for duration.
I would like to see buffs generally handled like this: Timed Buff: Increases ,,,,,, and/or . Last around 20-50 rounds unless extremely powerful. Hungry Buff: Wizard skill buffs. Increases resist, ,, , and/or. 1 mana per 6 turns for weaker buffs, 1 mana per 3 turns for stronger buffs, 1 mana per turn for extremely strong buffs. Brittle Buff: Increases ,,,,, and/or exotic resist. If you have to active the skill it should have 10-20 hits. If it passively activates then 1-5 brittle.
D: Sometimes, the level of expertise people seem to exhibit about DoD's coding makes me sad. Quite sad. Because then I can't just pretend the devs can't simply render changes by their sheer will. But, given this is the case, then I hop on the train that brittle buffs need more charges. Still, it seems quite ineffective to give you a defensive buff that goes away after you get hit, which is what the buff is for in the first place. However, I will concede that these buffs are likely far better than I'm giving them credit for. Suit Up comes to mind, which I primarily only use for the health regen to walk around with, and not quite for combat (especially given its long cooldown.) Effective? Maybe. I still don't like it. Its use is... unintuitive. Assuming there is a use besides, you know, walking around with the health regen. Another issue with these brittle buffs is they exist to mitigate damage, and yet benefit from not getting hit (i.e. counter-attack and dodge). It would make sense if, say, a brittle buff gave you dodge and thus encouraged stacking dodge so you had enough dodge to keep the brittle buff going and thus keep dodging. But you can't do that with block/amor absorption as you'll run out of the buff real quick-like. I enjoy buffs like Swashbuckling and I'm Not Left-Handed, as despite their brief durations they feel intuitive to use. You know you'll get your money's worth as long as you keep fighting. Though, given the above they'd probably work well as brittle buffs themselves. However, I'd rather something like Suit Up be a short duration turn buff, to make the use of the skill feel impactful. Like an "Oh shit, I'm surrounded, time to mitigate this incoming damage" skill. Sorry, I think this post got a little rambly.
How is this impossible? Couldn't you, say, recursively call a spell that triggers 0 turn buffs leading up to an X turn spellthat removebuffbyname's the original buff (i.e. Celestial Aegis) and gives you a new one? It might not be perfect, but it would do what the OP wanted. Similarly, as the spell operates off a similar method for every iteration, you could simply template it for any desired spell.
I would generally agree that most brittle buffs are underpowered. As a caster things like the lobsermane fungus are useful because you are trying to avoid being hit at all, but as a tank, you are getting hit, and the extra armor is reducing what you take, but the brittle buff buff is being consumed even when you would have blocked almost all of it. It would be cool if there were brittle buffs that had threshold for charge loss. Like getting hit for 1-2 damage might not break the lobster buff, but getting hit for over 5 or 8 or 10 of one of the damages AA can mitigate would eat a charge. The other thing I think would be cool about brittle buffs is cool effects going off when they use their last charge(some torus explosion or holy radiance boom) or ramp up ability the fewer charges they have.
While there are some brittle effects that need a higher duration, I don't necessarily think all of them do. Mushrooms, in particular, are so plentiful with the right build that you wouldn't want them to be much more powerful or you'd risk making Fungal Arts too good. It was way over-powered in 1.0.9 if you had the patience for it. Suit Up is only a second-level skill, and thus doesn't need to be particularly powerful. With a 10-turn brittle, it would be too good on the first floor (since none of the monsters on that floor do more than 5 damage and none have more than 2 ), yet it would still not good enough to be worth using instead of attacking in the middle of a fight on floor 5. The current optimal use window for Suit Up is after/between fights, to speed up recovery time and make the first couple hits of the next fight a little less damaging. The true strength of Suit Up is not really the +2 component, much of it's potency comes from the +4 you can have between fights, which saves a lot of food-management trouble especially on NTTG.
That's kind of what I was getting at, bergstrom. I use it for the health regen, which... seems kind of lame. The buff can be changed, after all. And I feel it should. That's just me, though. If it's too good at 10 hits, why not nerf the numbers to keep it in line? Alternatively, Suit Up could be made into a regenerating brittle buff, as someone stated is possible. This would make it good at keeping topped off, as you mitigate the damage from a couple monsters, and recover, but if you fight too long the buff wears out. The cooldown could be increased, and the numbers could be adjusted to compensate for this. New buff: Suit Up Cooldown: 60 seconds Lasts for 8 hits, recharges 1 hit per 10 turns. Once hit 8 times, all stacks are removed. Stacks 3 times 1 2 1 Numbers subject to tweaking, of course. This buff takes a while to ramp up, but once it does you've got reliable mitigation and recovery, unless you get into a full-out slugfest, which you often want to do to reach your full potential as a warrior (on-getting-hit buffs from MoA and SB as well as Berserker Rage). Given that MoA skills are [supposedly] only going to work when wearing armor, this will restrict rogues from making good use of it. Unnecessary change? Maybe. I think it'd be an improvement, though.
Lies! You give it a delayed cast spell that uses a requirebuffontrigger to detect if the buff is still active. If it is, cast another spell that does a removebuffbyname and casts the original spell again.
That is, if you want it to refill all charges at the same time. If you want it to refill them one by one, you have to take the detour (meaning you won't be doing it "normally").
As an aspiring Dredmor modder, I would caution you against using such terminology in the future. I've seen multiple occasions where someone asks if something is possible to do through modding, and people on these boards will give an answer akin to "Well, yes, but only by the 'good' modders." This could push potentially 'good' modders away if they are scared they can't pull it off. I'd recommend giving at the very least an overview of how it would be possible, as Fax did in his post above yours. More modders is a good thing right? Let's encourage it.
Ugh, whatever. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against you and I do see your point, but I'm tired (pretty much perpetually, to be honest) so I won't get subtle when it comes to telling people "you need more experience to do that on your own; make more mods and you ought to see why and how to do it", and if someone jumps to a conclusion that it is difficult instead of either trying or asking, he isn't going to be able to do it either way (I would like to point out that I had not written that it is hard, or difficult, or anything - merely that it is too time-consuming to do it unless you really want to do that). And I'm the one who gives the answer you perceive as a wrong one (the "Well, yes, but only by the 'good' modders."), but that is only when people with clearly little or no experience ask if it's possible to do something that requires some experience to know what they are doing (the kinds of things that you have to know are possible, otherwise we'd have to guide the one who wants to do it through the whole process). But if either of them actually asked for help after that, they would've gotten it, the answer is not meant to scare them away but rather show them that experience is an important factor here. Either way, if they do run away from modding completely merely because something is time-consuming, they weren't suited to making mods in the first place. Now, getting back to the topic (and all that), the detour is pretty simple. Instead of one brittle buff, you need to make a series of them, every one of them with one 1 hit (so that it would disappear when you are hit/hit something/whatever is the trigger supposed to be), and every one of them will have two things: - The desired effect (copy-pasted, unless you want it to change depending on how many charges are there) - A trigger (that can't be resisted at all) that puts the buff that is supposed to represent a buff with one less charge than the one you had; the one that is supposed to represent having only one charge should instead trigger a spell that would remove the control buffs. To that, you add another buff series, that we shall refer to as control buffs, that have two things; - Either DoT or delayed triggers that will be switching those buffs every turn (placing another buff, and removing itself), to emulate cooldown (the "0-turn" one will turn into the one with the longest timer); the "0-turn" cooldown should additionally trigger a spell that will - Trigger that activates at the same time as the controlled buffs' trigger activates, resetting the control buffs to the one representing the longest timer. The spell used to change the controlled buffs is, rather than a single spell, a series of spells, each of them with both a "requirebuffontrigger" trigger for adding a higher-charge-number buff, and a normal trigger for removing the currently present buff. It should check from buff with the highest number of charges (you don't place triggers to remove that one, because there's no need to, but the rest of them will all have the removing effect), to the one with just one charge. That is why is it time-taking, but if you know what you are doing, there's no real difficulty, and a large part of it is copy-paste. And the whole thing can be simplified, of course, but if you ask me to describe something that would work the way they had asked about, that is what you get.
Am I the only one lost trying to figure out why anyone would want to change Lesser Syzrgy ever? Seriously, it costs mana to maintain, and it's boost is not as game breaking as the Syzrgy was before the nerf, so why nerf it again at all? That would be like the Department of Redundancy Department. You don't nerf something that got nerfed, that's just silly. And hungry? Who came up with that term for it's costing of mana per turn?
You can cancel the Lesser Synrgy at any time you want. Why would you nerf an ability that literally can be canceled by the player any time, ever. If the player can kill it at any time, why nerf it at all? That doesn't make sense to me. Isn't that a bit harsh? I mean, look at the ingot fiasco. They nerfed it because people abused how many ingots you got. If I am missing something major, let me know.
Totally worth it. Lesser Syzygy is nowhere near as strong as its greater cousin is and you have a maintenance charge anyway. It's one of those things which are "nice to have" but aren't that gamebreaking. By the same concept you'll have to nerf the potions of steeling too.
