Come Bitch About Skills! [Skills Rebalance Brainstorming]

Uhm, about the Demon Form changes... I saw you made every skill usable in the demon form. It's nice and all, but being like that it seems just like another polymorph skill tree, with better skills than the werediggle (since they can be used as human and as demon).
So, what about making just the demon ones usable in demon form, but with buffed/secondary effect? That because for what I've read in those forums, the first 3 levels are fine as they are now, when the demon abilities need something more. And to mantain game balance, instead of buffing the existing skills, we could buff the polymorphed skills.
And, after all, a pc can cast the circle before becoming a demon, and I've never heard of a demon who turn other demons.
Anyway, those are just speculations, my next character will have the demonology skill to test this.

 

Play more D&D.

 

This might just be me using them wrong, but I've never seen the Dagger skill tree as very good. It gives almost no skill gains compared to the other weapons- 3 piercing, 1 nimble, 6 sneak, 10 EDR, and 2 counter compared to Sword's 4 piercing, 2 slashing, 3 melee, 10 counter, 18 EDR, and `1 crit, and its two stances just decrease your melee power even more, making it almost impossible to reliably deal damage with it

 

The weapon skills are all changing to look more like Dagger and Polearm and less like themselves. Also, Ive never had a problem with Daggers. You either play a Warrior and outpump the Melee Power deficit and make it up with Crit. Stance, or you play a rogue and skip Melee Power and instead double the effectiveness of your exotic damage bonuses by Countering a shitload.

 

The dagger tree
IS NOT
ABOUT SHEER DAMAGE
This is incredibly obvious, due to all the stuff you said. Two Attacks One Dagger, Sneaky Dagger Stance, Liechtenauer's Switcheroo, they all play into making you play smartly! You're not supposed to mindlessly run at and click on an enemy when you encounter one, you're supposed to sneak in, get free crits and hits, avoid damage, that's why it's a Rogue class tree!
TL;DR Daggers are fine, you're just doing it wrong.

 

I leave the dagger discussion to you, since I don't have problems with it, and I like it and it's concept.
I want to discuss about Egyptian Magic, and more specificly about the sandstorm.
I read someone (maybe kazeto?) talking about a remove glyph trigger, and it could work, with a tweak. It's true, the glyphs are very expensive, and the mana unkeep cost is really high if you use every single one (and above all glyh of ra), but it's as much true that those are the essence of the sandstorm.
So I say that the sandstorm could have a possibility of deleting one or more debuffs upon casting it. Like a <effect type="removebuffbyname" name="glyph name" percent="x"/>
This can prevent sandstorm spam, but it doesn't obliterate the meaning of the sandstorm ability, and the sense of GREAT SAND DESTROYING YOUR FOES which is always great. And both gish and wizards will love it. And the sense of being an ancient mysterious art is strengthened.
So? Could it work?

 

My own two cents on dagger are that it's quite nice when it worked: It was nice to be sneaky as hell and using stances and whatnot. It's just a shame that as early as dungeon level 2 (Or 1 if you knock down wooden doors) you get monsters capable of straight up ignoring your piercing damage. Also, critical hits still only affect melee damage right? I recall that making the sneaky stance rather underwhelming when it dropped my melee power from 3 to 0 and my massive crit chance was about as useful as MP on a pure rogue run.

 

Well, I was the one to originally suggest it, but as removing one instance of every glyph. Since then, someone else suggested only removing one random glyph and that is much better than my idea.

 

And fairly easy to code, too. I'll do that. Any other critiques of CotW stuff?

 

Well, it depends on whether your plans include doing anything to the last skill from Communism.

 

I still say that kills the entire tree. Glyphs are horribly expensive, with only tiny cost reductions from Savy. Under your suggestion, and with 40 Savy, Sandstorm would cost somewhere between 27 and 44 mana a cast, plus 2 turns. Add that to the huge upkeep Glyphs have and you'll never have enough mana to cast Sandstorm again. A much better idea would be to simply reduce the damage it deals.

Communism in general. Guerrilla Attack is more suited for a rouge than a warrior, and the rest of the skills are pretty underwhelming. What counts as a curse, by the way? Any debuff, or do certain ones not count?

Also Tourist lv 3. Ten percent more Zorkmids is just useless. Up it to 25%

 

Mostly agreeing with Nacho's last post. Long version:

Sandstorm knocking out a random Glyph seems too much if it's happens every time, but could work if it's only a relatively small chance of happening. As Nacho pointed out this makes the sandstorm much more expensive, but it goes beyond that, as it also costs you a turn recasting your glyph. However, if it's random or inconsistent, it then requires constant vigilance on the player's part... and that should be tested thoroughly to make sure it's not too annoying.

Vanguard Party never seems worth it to me, as some of the random debuffs outscale it too heavily. The starting equip, Guerilla and Socialist Healthcare are good, but the later half of the tree doesn't excite me.

Tourist level 3 is too weak to even be noticed as-is. If you're 10% shy of buying the thing you really want, you just open 2 more doors and you'll be covered, so why waste a skill level. Plus, early game cash rewards are small enough that the +10% might be lost to rounding down. At 25% it might start to make a difference, and makes you want to explore the synergy with Mathemagic or Banksterism.

 

I'd be fine with a random chance of knocking out a random glyph, but I'd rather seriously nerf Ra's Blast. Sandstorm is far too expensive to use against less than 3 targets with any number of glyphs active, but Ra's Blast is a free spell that deals 18+.3 magic power damage to everyone surrounding you every time you attack, plus the basic attack (boosted by another 2 damage from the Ra Glyph), with a 75% chance to knock them all back. Without that, Egyptian mages would have a much harder time saving their mp, and would probably need to level up a 2nd spell tree to handle small packs of enemies. Glyph of Anubus is 2 damage and 2 resistance for 1/5 mana a turn. For 1/3 a turn, we could easily remove Ra's Blast's damage, have it proc on defense too, and use it exclusively for pushing monsters back a square, plus the 4 resistance/2 damage the glyph naturally adds. If that's not strong enough, add another 2 points of damage for a total of 4 resistance, 4 damage.

 

I've never had Dagger's special attacks be terribly devastating, with the obvious exception being the first one. Not even the capstone. Does it scale with something that a rogue/warrior doesn't have? Am I just waiting too long to get to it, and the point is for it to trash the pre-RotDG floors?

Also, I've had a skill to bitch about that I've held back for a while.

It Belongs In A Museum is beyond godly. It can get you a full build before you get to level 10. I still die with it, of course, but that's because I suck at this game. Then you have the confuse, the reroll, and the krong trick. It's even one of those good level 0 skills! Geez!

One more: For being a gishy skill (it has two awesome buffs after all) Viking Magic has some pretty lame skills. It has a snare and a ranged DoT, which are dead levels if you've got yourself a chokepoint and you're wearing armor instead of stacking magic power.

 

The very first skills is actually underwhelming in terms of damage: It's just a melee hit.

The random proc ability does 1+(0.15x). So, roughly every 7 sneakiness is more damage, sneaky stance adds straight up 3, almost 4 damage that way.

Blood Geyser Strike does 5+(0.5x) and causes geysering wound if the target is an animal, which grants -20, -2, -3, -1, -1, -1, -1, and finally geysering wound itself grants Horrid Bleeding which is a DoT dealing 2+(0.2x), and if I'm reading the xml right it does 4 applications of this? So, it uses nimbleness (which as a rogue you should have in spades), and debuffs animals. Also the debuff apparently can stack 5 times, but the skill's got a recast of 9 and the debuff a duration of 4, so that shouldn't matter.

Finally, Devouring Wound technique does 2+(0.5x) + 2+(0.5x) and finally inflicts Thaumites for an additional 3 +(0.18x), and 7 more turns of 7+(0.21x), and finally -10 and -2 for the duration, and dropping as a spell mine to re-infect whoever on the 8th turn. For starters, this skill essentially gives you +2 damage for every 2 caddishness, but the most important thing about it is that it deals putrificaton damage instead of piercing, finally giving you something to use against robots and cubes and other such junk.

 

Once again: NOT DUMB MUSCLE. Sneak up behind an enemy and hit them, bam, free crit hit. Switcheroo, another free hit. That's two attacks the enemy can't do anything about--three if you activated Two Attacks, One Dagger!

 

So what you're saying is the tree simply has absolutely no way to deal with more than 1 monster at once.

 

It raise also counterattack, and stealth mode+.

 

Yes, it focuses on fighting one enemy at a time. That's part of why the Switcheroo is there: to escape when you're being mobbed by enemies.
In fact, you could say the Switcheroo...
[sunglasses]
gets you the hell out of dodge.


REGARDLESS, you're gonna want to use stealth and something like Piracy to deal with multiple enemies. If you're relying on a single tree to deal with all of your enemies, all the time, you're playing this game horribly wrong.

 

And if you use it to get through Digula, it lets you dodge out of Hell.