Come Bitch About Skills! [Skills Rebalance Brainstorming]

I was actually changing Communism last week, but didn't finish it. Here's what I did (maybe you'll take some of these with you):

 

Ex

Except rouge scientists already sink their mana into Baromatic Vortex Blast and Sonic Blast. Unless you pump your mana regen up, those two easily cost you more mana than you're naturally getting back, even if they don't "cost" any.

 

I don't want to be an ass, but it's "rogue" scientists and not "rouge" (the latter is a colour). It's all fine here since most people know what it's supposed to be about, but take care not to mistake that in some official paper (whatever would that paper be).

@Essence:
Yeah, I see why you made that spell work this way, and I also see why is Manapocalypse working like that. Though I think one could argue about about Arcane Capacitor being deadly to the player (unless we get to the "it doesn't want to explode because we resisted it" thing which was not intended), just like one could argue about whether Manapocalypse was useless or not (it is not, if one knows when to use it, because it is a "last resort" kind of spell and not a "first contact" one; even more so, it is great if you can use Skepticism right after it because you know you won't be casting anything).

 

brb making communism/rogue scientist fusion tree

 

Symbiotic Toadstool doesn't remove Symbiotic Toadstool.

 

heh. I'll get back to this once I can say the weapons and Deadshot are actually ready for Gaslamp.

 

I just keep track.

 

So, here's some stuff:

One of the main corrupting monsters, all the terrifying end-game Diggles, and Fish Paladins a.k.a. the only monsters that deal Righteous damage, all ignore you when you're a Vegan.

Vegan's power far outweighs its excuse for a "downside" if you have any way whatsoever of mitigating it. Even if not, there are times when even fighting with Vegan's debuffs on is made up for by the awesome Blinding Flash. We are talking about a skill that offers way, way more than most skills do, for very little penalty.

Magic School. It's pretty damn boring. It gives you max mana, a silence, and Extra-planar Concentration. I'm not totally convinced that max mana is even that useful. Then the capstone gives you just some boring stats. And the second active skill is worse than Leylines' second skill. I know that the Savvy combined with all that extra max mana is good, but come on, this tree could be made into something cooler.

 

Proposals for dealing with Veganism?

 

I am gonna second that Magic Training is pretty lame. With all the mana generating booze out there having a ton of extra mana isn't super exciting. Honestly I could think of all sorts of things that you could do with it.

-Maybe two stances that are opposite eachother. One that gives huge magic power and negative regen, and another than gives huge mana regen and negative magic power.

-Stacking buffs that increase magic power for a short duration

-A passive that increases magic power temporarily based on how much mana you currently have.

-An adaptive buff proc that occurs when you take spell damage, stacking, so that if you are repeatedly taking your magic training allows you to temporarily give yourself (which would probably be extremely overpowered)

As for veganism. I love the tree. It takes a lot of mental acuity to not hit the animals in a melee build, but the tree is totally flavorful game changing fun and the passive stats are pretty darn awesome.

 

I like Veganism too. I'd rather see the tree left alone, but some more dangerous non-animals added; several of the late Undead with spells could easily have Ranged Corrupt added, and a Righteous monster could be a bright yellow Sparky/Entropic Elemental sprite called a Photon.

 

Interesting ideas, wootah. Unfortunately, there are no XML hooks for "trigger when taking X kind of damage" or for "buffs that scale based on stats", so the last two ideas you have are out, but the first two are solid.

Also, I'm not going to go adding new monsters to the game as part of a skills rebalance. I'll have to think hard about Veganism and see what, if anything, actually needs doing.

 

Really, the animal taxa just needs to be split into two - "animal" animals (raven, squid etc.) and "monster" animals. (diggle, wyrm).

 

Yeah, if it was posible to have "non-hostile" animals still hit you with spells in any possible way I think that would be the way to go. Except it's pretty darned broken even if you're not doing a rebalance, as in, someone who's just learning he game and hit's random is gonna be playing a very different game than with almost anything else - and not because the animals aren't attacking him, but because hes factually immune to most magic users and most (all?) of the righteous damage in the game.

Technicaly, the way things are now, I suspect picking vegan and not investing a single point into it is probably the brokenest thing you could do in a game.

I don't think a moddable fix could fix that, though. It has more to do with the monster-ability distribution, and/or the way taxa affecting "handles" work. The tree itself is pretty much ok, and might still be bugged with the "charmed monster doesn't aggro" thing. Question is wether the dev's have time/energy to fiddle with it, but as far as I can tell the way it is now wasn't intended, and the ability to ignore righteous as a monster damage type with no effort messes things up in a lot of places (skills, items, challenge level, checks and balances, and I don't think anyone can clear CoE and Mystereous portals the way a Vegan can).

 

I actually think OneMoreNameless has hit on the easiest effective solution.

 

Do subtaxas work? I'm asking because of BGH, or just expand it to include everyone (both the monster and the animals)?

 

Thank you, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Veganism completely changes or removes some very very major things from the game.

Yes, the best solution for Veganism is to add a righteous monster that isn't a paladin, a corrupting monster that isn't a Magic Dragon (technically there are already Magic Golems) and an existential animal that isn't a raven. Then we need replacements for octos/ranged diggles.

 

If we can do that, I support it. Otherwise, very, very seriously increase the vegan debuffs (like, double them).

The problem with Magic Training is there are 2 classes devoted to giving you extra mana, and Ley Walker is strictly better than its competitor. After 3 levels, Ley Walker's given you 3 mana regeneration, 4/5ths of a mana each turn, 13 mana, and a 5% chance to get another 10 mana regeneration and 5 magic power for 20 turns each time you cast a spell. Factor in booze and you'll never want for mana again, unless you've decided to become a mage clad in heavy armor or something. There's just no need to take both of them, and if you're only taking one, the one that's not Magic Training is the obvious choice. I'm not sure there's anything we can do to fix it without essentially replacing it with another class though. Maybe if it focused more on magic power than MP and Savvy. Replace each point of Savvy with 1 point of magic power and each point of MP with half a point of magic power. lv 1 gives 5 power, 2 gives 2 power and Thaumoentropic Missile, 3 gives 6 power, etc...

 

I think the best way to solve Vegan is to make the curses unremovable, long lasting, and provide maluses that well and truely exceed the required amount - and then add a way (I have some ideas using dummy buffs) to make sure Vegans can't ranged kill animals.

 

Eh, I don't think the Vegan skillset as such really needs much fiddling with, with the possible exception of the 2 debuffs which aren't Fallen Vegan (Fallen Vegan is probably the only non-sight penalty debuff in the game I'm personaly afraid of, and I don't even care about Corruption). The problem is that it's balanced around the whole "can't kill animals EASILY" thing being a penalty, while in fact it's huge effortless way to sidestep most of the stuff in the game thats challenging. And if you couldn't kill monsters at all it would be unplayable because you'd be missing out on way too much XP.

Incidentaly Vegans can still get corrupted plenty fine, theres Golems and Blobs who can mess you up (happened to me on my last playthrough, except I didn't go mad over it as the game was too breezy anyway).

The real thing is what OneMoreNameless and Essence, and Kazushiro (and me, in the "stuff I'd change" thread a few days back) said, and OneMoreNameless and Essnce thecnicaly probably nailed the soulution - if the spellcastes wre mostly Monsters on top of being animals (or something which let BGH still apply it's bonus), but they could still cast spells at Vegans, I think they'd be fine.



And as for Magic Training - max mana just isn't that good, Leylines second level is a broken, broken spell, mana regen in general works for bothe pure mage and gish builds, Paranormal and Wizard Law both give "get rid of"/"silence" spells at acessible levels, the "higher up the tree" broken mana recharge also gives you a sight penalty, and I think the capstone's actually fine...

Suggestion - eh, no clue. There isn't much depth to what kind of support wizards actualy want, it's cropped up as a problem in the armor rebalance thread. Maybe make it work around booze somehow? Plenty of "Magic Training har har" jokes about alcoholism in sight, although it would technicaly be drug endorsment... Maybe keep one level of max mana boost, the capstone, possibly even the silence, but stick in ways to get different/better/workable alcohol "debuffs" progression?