A God am I - Egyptian Magic

I think the only thing that really needs nerfing is the sandstorm, which hits like a freight train. The buffs, by themselves, seem like they'd be great for a gish but are mostly pretty weak. The first two especially feel like wasted points, the bonuses they provide are really more in line with what you would expect out of a passive ability. The tree really only starts paying for itself once you get sandstorm and the better glyphs that come after it.

 

That idea of yours could even be worked as a flavorful debuff - wasn't it Osiris who was torn to pieces, then resurrected, but some went missing?


Also, you've all got your panties in a bunch about Sandstorm - which is completely justified, but has everyone forgotten about the Eye of Ra ? That spell OBLITERATES in melee more or less as much as Sandstorm does in the AoE department. It adds damage, resistances and all-around knockback. Add to that a good weapon (who cares if it's not your specialty) and stray monsters and sandstorm leftovers are dispatched quickly. And chances of getting a good weapon go up when you can kill Brax.

 

Excellent point. Maybe if the knock-back/sick fires bro! was resisitable?

 

Yes, though the appendage that went missing was rather more...personal than an arm or a leg. Fortunately, Isis managed, in the end.

Perhaps there might be a chance of a random loss to a section of the body, that would then grow back over time. If a leg, the PC would move slower relative to monsters. If an arm, the PC would find themselves unable to, well, use their left or right arm, meaning they're reduced either a weapon or a shield, but not one of each, or two weapons. I'd limit it pretty much to that.

But there are many spells that obliterate at melee. Since there are tons of them, and usually many on a single screen, I don't think anybody sees yet-another as an issue. I'm not even anxious about Sandstorm. I just want to see it become less of a wet dream for munchkins, and more of a very carefully managed choice for the strategically minded mage.

 

Thing is if you don't have Ley Walking or Blood Magic then keeping all the buffs up is borderline impossible, playing a random build character like that now and ok it's doable with enough alcohol but you certainly won't have enough mana for more than one sandstorm before you mana bottoms out.

So the problem is if you've got the skill synergy back up it's incredible, but if not it's kinda weak as none of the earlier buffs are that amazing so if it's getting nerfed it really does have to be done carefully imo.

 

I agree. But that's why it's important to plan out a synergy of professions in advance. Egyptian Magic should only work with lots of enchanted items and mana-pumping skills. There are several magic-using skills that work for the melee/magic type or ranged/magic type. This is a great exception, and I think it should stay that way: more powerful, but mana-intensive like you wouldn't believe.

 

Before egyptian magic is nerfed, has anyone used sandstorm in the later levels? A lot of that damage is static.

It's strong in that it gives both the room clearing sandstorm and excelent buffs/melee power at the cost of massive mana upkeep. But I'm not entirely sure it's overpowered. Ok, the ra melee buff knockback + massive damage is probably too strong.

 

Personally I don't really care what kind of nerf it gets as long as it gets nerfed, roflstomping everything with one spell -at no risk- quickly looses it's charm. I want to play with it but I don't wanna feel like a prick to all those poor diggles, they at least should have somekind of chance to kill me and as things are now they don't even have a chance to get a chance to get a chance to kill me... or anybody else.

Anything that outdamages Tenebrous Rift without any actual drawbacks is a bad thing, period.

 

In the latest build, if you are standing in the Sandstorm, you get a crazy stacking vision debuff that makes you entirely blind.

 

In the latest build, if you are standing in the Tenebrous Rift, you die.

...admitted I didn't know of that drawback, although it does very little to fix the balance issues as, well, who the heck'd want to stand in the fleshflaying storm of painful death?

 

Meh, I do when I'm surrounded and need to kill people. And with all your buffs up you don't take much damage from it.

EDIT: And it goes a long way towards making it harder to splash with as a Warrior build, as some have been worried about.

 

I was curious about this as well. I finished up my guide today instead of testing it. The scaling is pretty poor for a bread and butter AOE spell but it has pretty incredible static damage. I'm worried you're going to see a damage fall off around > DL10. I have heard people killing Dredmor easy with the skill in their build though. I'll sqeeze in some testing tomorrow.

 

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I have to admit that the very thought of Gish'ing with Egyptian Magic never really occured to me, guess it kinda shows that I should start doing a few melee characters, that arn't werediggles, once in a while.

 

Egyptian Magic just shouldn't be possible for melee characters, in my opinion. The mana drain should be far heavier than could be managed unless several other skills are factored in--in which case you no longer have a melee character.

 

I thought it was built for a gish with all those buffs. They aren't terribly useful for a mage. Eye of Ra seems especially suited to a melee character. Just because you have bloodmagic and/or leylines doesn't mean you can't melee. I played a gish style pole arm character with Egyptian which worked quite well until I got killed by charging Rutabagas. (120 hp gone in one turn. It's being worked on I am assured.)

So Egyptian is very doable with a melee character. Especially once you factor in booze.

 

Correction; everything SHOULD be possible for any character, naturally with varying degrees of success. The way that things are now where Sir "Blood Mage/1-Egyptian Magic/6-Random Skillset" can roflstomp his way through the game without encountering any real problems is a terrible, absolutely utterly terrible, because it effectively removes the whole "varying degrees of success" factor from the skill. Which is bad because it hurts gamebalance, potentially confuses new players (even further) and makes the skill unattractive for people who arn't planning to munchkin their way through the game.

That beeing said I agree that Egyptian Magic should have more of a "Magey" feel to it rather than the currect gishy one. There's already a ton of gishy skills (Viking Wizardry, Psionics, Warlockery, Staves, argueably Necronoconomics and Battle Geology etc etc) and gish is only a nieche, I demand more "Magey" Wizard skills damnit! Although that's merely a personal perfference.

 

I would think if you're going to Gish you DON'T have all the glyphs up at once? But I mean also it'd still be a gish skill, not a warrior that takes one magic skill skill.

 

It's fairly do-able to keep all the glyphs up as a gish. I had more than enough to keep them and mini-syzygy going, between blood magic and ley lines. I also didn't cast ANYthing else. But I didn't have to....

 

With the skill in their build? Sure, I'll buy that. Using Sandstorm specifically as the Dredmor-killing spell? Aw hell no. In both Core and RotDG, Dredmor boasts rather hefty resists against every single damage type that a fully-buffed Sandstorm brings to bear. In the base game, you need 90 Magic Power for Sandstorm to do one damage per turn against Big D's 375 HP. RotDG ups that to 170 power -- again, for 1 DPT. Even with 300 power -- which, I would note, is far beyond most characters' means -- a single cast of Sandstorm can't scrape off more than 5% of RotDG Dredmor's 672 HP in one turn.

As for Sandstorm outdamaging Tenebrous Rift ... lolwut? After you factor in the timed-delay spells that the Rift procs, the Rift-mines scale nearly twice as well as a best-case fully-buffed Sandstorm. Yes, Sandstorm has a boatload more up-front and static damage going on, but Rift's combined effects are flat-out better as soon as you hit a mere 31 Power. Even before that, a third (or more!) of Sandstorm's damage per turn is coming from Ruin of Time's blastingR and armor debuffs, which means Rift has an extra advantage against the enemy types on which RoT doesn't proc.

 

Yeah, Tenebrous Rift is still the reigning champ for most powerful AoE spell.

I think Egyptian could probably best be handled by nerfing the static damage of Sandstorm but then add some scaling to it to make it relevant at higher levels, also encouraging a more magey build to get the most out of it. It should always be somewhere south of Tenebrous Rift's power of course.

Maybe buff the first two skill levels a bit. They still seem pretty irrelevant to me, except maybe as a down payment for sandstorm.