Dredmor Patch 1.1.1 Feedback Thread

I see, that is a reason not to use them.

 

So! I'm down to DL5 with my Egyptian Magic gish build. And let me tell you, when I hit capstone and found a monster zoo for the first time, I was THRILLED! I had never wrought this level of destruction before. It was MAGNIFICENT! The power! THE POWER!

That said, I've discovered it's not really a gish tree as I initially suspected. The knockback from Ra really messes things up (twice now I've knocked a teleportation lever to the next island, leaving me stranded. Thank god for Invisible Geometries.) But it's otherwise enormously potent.

Call of the Niles isn't as great as I thought it'd be, but I might be missing something with glyph combinations. I have all glyphs on all the time because Leyline Walker is awesome. (Good thing you can't actually anger any elder beings by spamming Thaumaturgic Tap, right?)

That said, I'm afraid Egyptian Magic is the new Promethean Magic, as my playstyle has turned from a gish to "Walk in room. Throw down sandstorm. Win forever."

I love everything else about the tree, though. And no, RNG didn't love me so much this time, though I've gotten some nice things that ended up not helping me much (Clockwork gauntlets, but melee power isn't very important now.)

 

</lurk>

Pretty impressed with how the game turned out , despite fresh bugs. Glad to hear the spear attacks will be fixed , as a free 5 tile range lunge made the first two dungeon levels rather trivial.

Bankster is surprisingly balanced , I expected its inner workings to be arcane but they aren't. Fairly exploitable , however , if a level 1-3 shop happens to sell some kind of 30 damage weapon.

Pity those monster morphing spells are causing crashes , that looked so interesting. Hopefully those waiting saves will still work after the bugfixes.

I am so looking forward to the new modding options opened by that update , as well.

 

I can't find where the devs said that it will be nerfed.

 

I think they're going to switch it with the attack that only hits one square...

 

Speaking of attack skills... You guys said pre CotW release that the new weapon skills would make us wish the old weapon skills were like the new weapon skills. This is... accurate, to state it mildly. I now have a hard time not picking either of the two, just because the stances are so useful. Dare I hope that the previous comment was a hint... that the old weapon skills are getting a re-tool? Coz that'd be awesome.

 

HEAVY ARMOR ASSAULT VAMPIRE!!!!!!

 

I must've missed something in the changelog, but Vampirism seems to be a lot less useful. Sometimes my melee attacks don't sap the life from enemies at all since the new patch, and since the dead corpse return seems capped at 3 HP, it's really not a good enough tradeoff to lose the out of combat healing, unless you pair it with another skill. It used to be very useful, considering you could use the sapping power during combat to keep yourself pretty much alive. But in my current game, I'm not getting any healing at all when attacking.

Can anyone help me out and explain what changes were made to the skill?

 

This has been the case for quite some time.

I thought this patch was gonna fix that, actually :|

 

small question, why is the clockwork drill lance still a staff and not a polearm? especially since its crafted from a naginatta, a polearm, I would hope that it would carry on.

 

Vampirism was in fact changed. And it did include feedback made in the re-work thread. However, the changes were a little backwards, and in fact nerfed Vampirism.

The new Vampire Attack is 2 ( + 1.0 x ). 1 ( + .60 x ) for Demons and .40 for Others. This has an added 2 flat regen but I think this only procs on the aforementioned monster types. Corpse drain, meanwhile, is 3 ( + 1.2 x ).

Your damage now scales off of health regen (a defensive stat) while your heal scales off of magic power (an offensive one.) Why is this bad? Because health regen is generally only given with temporary, out-of-combat buffs. See: knit tissue, MoA/Shield bearer brittle buffs, and others. Health regen is also difficult to come by, and very difficult to stack. I also don't believe Vampire Attack's Magic Power scaling should've been removed. So I propose we grant both formulas hybrid scaling, with Corpse Drain having a primary scaling on regen.

New Vampire Attack: 2 ( + .25 x ) ( + .50 ) against animals, scaled appropriately for other types. Alternatively, the regen scaling is removed and Vampirism Attack is given a propietary Regen Life effect that scales to . This is to throttle the actual damage of the attack (which is only half the point of the ability.)

New Corpse Drain: 3 ( + 1.0 x ) ( + .25 x ).

Vampires are unduly vulnerable to traps because they lack regeneration, as they can't actually fight back against traps. Another reason being even with scaling they simply can't take advantage of defensive buffs like they should. Therefore I firmly believe that Vampires, while not allowed to consume foods, should be allowed to regenerate health. Corpse Drain could be nerfed accordingly, or possibly even removed (it is a tedious thing to do). Alternatively, to throttle overall power, this change could be coupled with a Vampire's inability to consume booze. This is compensated for Psychic Vampire, which could very well be buffed as well.

But those are fairly radical changes. So, for the sake of alternatives, I propose we add a stance that allows Vampires to regenerate naturally (taking advantage of aforementioned regeneration buffs) with penalties to certain stats. We all agree Vampirism is primarily a wizard tree, no? The magic power scaling makes this evident. So. Instead of nerfing survivability (which goes against the point of these buffs) we could nerf offensive potential with -, -, or even disallowing mana natural mana regeneration. Doing the latter would truly turn it into a stance you'd actually want to leave on in standard operation, rather than simply healing up and then turning the stance off (which would be kind of boring.)

Regenerative Focus
Cooldown of 1 turn (stance)
Buff: -5 , -5, 10
You are focusing your Vampiric energies on regeneration, and so are closing your wounds with supernatural fortitude, regenerating as humans do (and better). However, you cannot naturally regenerate mana naturally (with ) , and your mental keenness is re-prioritized.

I'd like everyone to keep in mind the point of the tree; active combat healing. So it should certainly do that well, but the drawbacks are unlike any other skill tree has. Killer Vegan's payouts are massive, and yet has an easy way to deal with it (throwing, ranged, magic, pets). Lack of health regeneration is simply an undue drawback for the amount of power the tree gives. The two escapes Vampirism has (sparkling and transylvation) simply don't synergize with the fact that as a Vampire, you either commit, or you escape with 4 hp and are boned unless you find a few dozen easy monsters to prey on.

I apologize for such a long-winded post, and I feel it belongs in the Vampirism re-work thread (and I may very well re-post this there as well.) Either way.

In conclusion, I hope this post re-opens the dialogue on Vampirism. There were changes made; this means GLG wants to help Vampies out. I presume a more thorough re-work wasn't possible due to time constraints, and thus they put in what they could manage. I can't emphasize enough how awesome it is to see some sort of change, even if it was a little detrimental. But still, balance marches on!

 

Nerfed? It definitely feels better and those brittle buffs are in-combat + with Walk It Off you can get quite the healing from animals.
You have to make a choice with Vampirism: Heavy armor less damage or better corpse drain. I don't think this is bad.

 

Corpse drain heals off of 1.2 with exactly the same syntax as the drain. Only Sparkles scale off of , and incredibly poorly I'll add. If it scaled that highly it would be like casting knitting flesh on yourself and having it heal instantly every four turns when there was a corpse, which would be beyond overpowered. In my revision, Vampires also got 1 for a level which was a good buff. It also gives you 1 free healing now on monsters you can't drain from, instead of healing them for 1 like it did before. Build the character trying to grab some free health regen (and there are numerous sources) and you'll do a lot better.

Code:

<spell name="Vampirism Attack" type="target" >
<effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.6" secondaryScale="13" taxa="Demon" />
<effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.4" secondaryScale="13" taxa="Other" />
<effect type="drain" necromantic="2" necromanticF="1.0" secondaryScale="13" taxa="Animal" />
<anim sprite="sprites/sfx/glintA/glintA" frames="5" framerate="60" centerEffect="0" sfx="fleshbore" />
<effect type="trigger" spell="Regen Life Effect 1"/> <!-- a free point of health, for effort. -->
</spell>
<spell name="Corpse Drain Heal" type="self" >
<effect type="heal" amount="3" amountF="1.2" secondaryScale="13" />
</spell>
<spell name="Corpse Drain" downtime="4" type="targetadjacentcorpse" icon="skills/wizard/vampirism1_32.png" >
<description text="Drains a corpse of its blood to gain (un)life. Bottoms up!" />
<effect type="trigger" spell="Corpse Drain Heal" />
<anim sprite="sprites/sfx/corpus_burst/corpus_burst" frames="7" framerate="100" sfx="naughty" centerEffect="0"/>
</spell>

 

Oh, really? I was under the assumption Dredmorpedia was accurate, given it pulls data from the game files.

It still stands to reason that it's odd the Attack scales off of regen. With all this regen scaling it seems more like a Warrior tree now, yet is still considered a Wizard tree.

It's also concerning that you are so dependent on "building for free health regen" as you say, as this really makes the skill tree dependent on others. I don't think that's a good thing, as no other tree is nearly that dependent. Others are reporting Vampirism is still weak, too.

 

Like I said I originally had it giving you free as you leveled so it could stand on its own. Somewhere along the line that dissapeared

 

Oh, by the way, unrelated to Vampirism I've found a few odd scaling issues (which may simply be incorrect in Dredmorpedia, if they are it'd be worth letting the owner of that site know).

Crossbow Blast scales off of and Assassination's Capstone, Et tu? scales off of . Would think the former would scale off of , , or something. The latter could be , or .

I'd go check the game files themselves but I have no idea how to read scaling numbers and my efforts at finding how to do so have been in vain.

 

Both of those are accurate. Both of those are there because there wasn't scaling on other attributes when they were made (not sure about crossbow blast, I don't think it's intended to have any scaling)

 

Oh, also, apparently Crossbow Blast "Performs Melee Attack" which seems kind of odd on a crossbow skill. That might have coding implications I'm not aware of, though.

 

The crafting window still makes me sad, the way the filters don't update on inventory change.

(For those who haven't heard this one before, what I'd like to see: say you have one hematite, a chalk and a coal. Open the ingot press, set filter to "have ingredients". Craft hematite into iron ingot. The hematite->iron recipe stays and the steel recipe appears immediately in the list. The iron recipe vanishes only when it's moved away from (so you don't accidentally create something you don't want when spam-clicking craft and run out of reagents). Then you go to the anvil tool and all the steel-needing recipes are already there, aware that you've got some since the window was opened.)

 

I'm sure the only way to refresh the list is to switch the filter off and on, which is even worse than you describe.