Come Bitch About Skills! [Skills Rebalance Brainstorming]

Well, I was under the impression the penalties weren't severe enough myself - if you guys think they are, then that's fine. I think depriving vegans of the XP of monsters, but also the threat of said monsters is fine - but at the moment vegan can kill them anyway.

Re: Magic Training; consider triggers on spell cast which restore mana over time. That way, you'd pick it for things like psionics, mathemagic, etc. that allow you to 'poke' with a relatively low cost spell, instead of nuking like in pyro or necro that wants blood magic, or buff trees that want ley.

 

Blobs of Corruption and some (if not all) of the Slick monsters corrupt. Not sure adding more corrupting monsters is necessary...

 

What's that about Slicks?

Huh.

I guess I've just never had a playthrough where I wasn't able to resist corruption by that point.

 

We don't need 3 different trees that restore MP. Not when Ley Lines does it so well no matter what you pick.

 

OK, so I spent all night brainstorming with a pen and paper on my nightstand and I came up with a bunch of what I think are cool enough new mechanical themes and mechanics that the ECSRII will make the vanilla magic support skills cool again.

Here goes:


Magic Training
Theme: Manipulating the very foundations of casting.
Level 1: Welcome to Pigzits. +5 Sagacity, +2 Savvy.
Level 2: License to Cast. As it currently is.
Level 3: Certamen Duelist. Gives the power to cast Certamen Circle, a destroyonmove buff that drains 50% of your mana but gives +10 Magic Resistance, +40 Magic Reflect, +8 Mana Regen, and -100 Dodge/Counter.
Level 4: Extraplanar Concentration. As it currently is.
Level 5: The Master Spell. Drains 10% of your Mana. Gives a buff removed the next time you cast. The buff gives you +100 Haywire and +10 Magic Power.


Ley Line Walker
Theme: Manipulating mana through the power of geography.
Level 1: Linewalker +1 Mana Regen. Loadout: Linewalker's Boots. (Grants +1 Mana Regen and +2 Block.)
Level 2: Thaumaturgic Tap: As it currently is.
Level 3: Discover Ley Nexus: Cooldown 87. Creates a spellmine that lasts 50 turns. Standing on the spellmine grants +5 Mana Regen and +10 Magic Resistance.
Level 4: Thaumaturgic Conflux: Increased from 5% trigger to 8% trigger.
Level 5: Invisible Geometries: As it currently is.


Blood Magic
Theme: Manipulating mana through the power of ichor and gore.
Level 1: Sanguinista: As it currently is.
Level 2: Vital Siphon: As it currently is.
Level 3: Powered By Pain: Gives player an 26% chance upon being hit in combat to restore 4 points of mana.
Level 4: Haematic Phylactery: As it currently is.
Level 5: The Red Exchange: Two effects depending on where you target it. Click adjacent to you, and you lose 17 HP and gain 7 mana. Click anywhere else, and you lose 17 mana and gain 7 HP.



Thoughts?

 

I love the changes to Magic Training and Ley Line Walker.

I don't think I like the level 5 of Blood Magic. Maybe I am just not understanding it. Activate and click a floor tile seems kind of klunky... like there is no other paralellel mechanic in the game that I can think of like that.

 

Dem numbers on Red Exchange. You sure that's actually effective? I understand that it's supposed to be a bad deal in both directions, but hell, 7 mana for a *huge* drawback as the capstone of the tree is a pretty hard sell. Same goes for 7 health. I understand wanting to make the numbers bad, though. Maybe also have it leave you with a buff?

Also, having *two* anti-mage tricks on WizSchool seems... eh. Not to mention, I've always hated License to Cast. It's a level 2 skill that is only relevant once in a while, not totally effective at what it does (it's certainly nothing compared to 40 reflect) and at that only from floor 3 forward. Maybe make the level 2 something to really pump up your max mana, like the Arcanist capstone (which gives you a max mana boosting buff when you cast.) This would also synergize with the rest of the tree.

I sorta wanted a way for Blood Magic to start off as being slightly weaker for casters, then have it get better at a later point. I love using Blood Magic to refill while nuking the crap out of a zoo, and to have an incentive for leveling it up would be really cool. Currently, for nukers, it's got two dead levels, and it still does in the remake here. And leveling it up doesn't even enhance your mana management power like it would if you were a gish.

Still, nothing strictly wrong with making it a gish-only tree.

 

I'm looking at those and would have to think about it, but unless I'm much mistaken there was a bit of a consensus that the current problem with Egyptian and Necro isn't so much in their own overpoweredness, but in the fact that the 2 activated mana recharge abilities (Lay Walker 2 and Magic Training 4 respectively) are too good in what they inadvertedly do, and that is to almost completely eliminate mana management by themselves. There was a suggestion for giving them an actual cost of some sort - lets be real, both trees are really bland, yet at least one of them is everywhere just because of these things.

Is there a way to tie them in with alcohol usage? Any way at all) I'll try to come up with something constructive, you've put an effort into this allready, just say if you can spot an obvious syntax related problem with tieing skills to alcohol consumption.

 

A skill that instantly converts all your alcohol stacks to mana (even at 80%) would be really really fun.

 

We don't need 10 different magic skills when pyromancy and mathemagic give you all the utility and damage you need.

We don't need 5 different weapon skills when any one of them will let you hit things harder.

I think your comment speaks more to "Ley lines OP" than "We don't need 3 skills that offer some MP restoral".

 

What if they restored your mana but left you with a silly debuff which stuck around untill you got drunk? Gazing into the dungeon dimensions while restoring your mana through the fight and having horryfying revelations or something chasing you unless you get really, really drunk right after the fight? Would be awesome!

Would work the way it does now, except you get a debuff which, unless you get drunk really fast afterwards summons a dread collector looking for whover stole the mana, a zalgo hit on you, or just a lingering debuff along the lines of Fallen Vegan? Not necessarily every time, but still the chance of it happening would have you lug some alcohol around

(If we want it to really creep folks out, have it "summon a corruption blob" in the debuff roster )

 

Just remember guys, the problem with Ley Walker wasn't that it wasn't powerfull enough, but that it was very powerfull and also boring. If it's gonna go that way it really needs a debuff proc penalty scheme of some sort. Thaumaturgical tap is allready obsoleting booze, and adding a second one in the form of a spellmine would really obsolete it.

EDIT: And if you go for the "something comes looking for whoever is stealing the mana" debuff scheme, you can make it seem like youre hacking someone's wifi ^^ "Quick, get roraring drunk to make your mana inflow look legit!"

EDIT II: And I like the make "Magic Training" a dueling wizard support skill idea quite a bit.

 

I say just nerf the numbers of Leywalker. Make it restore only one per turn, make it last longer, make the overall gain somewhat less.

 

I vote for it getting a low-ish (10~15%) chance to get a "super steampack" effect, draining back 40~50% of mana it gave you after about a dozen turns and dealing negligible health damage (2 + 0,02 * to self). That would not make it any less potent, but it would make it unsafe, thus making booze into a fail-safe.

I think that instead of increasing magic resistance, it should decrease it by a few points (-10 ought to be good instead of the +10 we have now), because standing on a point where mana concentrates and hoping that spells will be less effective is like standing amidst explosive barrels in games and hoping not to get hurt. If you think that would be too much of a nerf, increasing magic power slightly would be good enough (and it would be justified - after all, you are standing on a point where mana concentrates).

How about this:
When you click on an adjacent tile, you lose 10 health and gain 4 mana. For each monster adjacent to you, you lose additional 2 health, this monster loses 10 health, and you gain additional 3 mana. So depending on how many monsters there are adjacent to you, it would be like this:

Monster count -> health lost / mana gained
0 -> 10 / 4
1 -> 12 / 7
2 -> 14 / 10
3 -> 16 / 13
4 -> 18 / 16

That means it would be the most effective if you were surrounded, and thus really good for gish characters (and mages would be able to deal some slight damage if they were all out of mana, too).

And if you click anywhere but on an adjacent tile, you lose 14 health and it creates a spell mine (with the sprite being something blood-related) that persists for 22 turns and heals the first thing (whether it's player or monster) for 4 health + additional 2 health per turn it's on the field (so 4 on the turn it was cast, 8 on the first turn you can reach it without teleporting, and as much as 48 on its final turn). You can do that by making a mine that heals and automatically spawns lesser mines that only heal.

That would make it good for when you have pets, and different from other abilities (the only thing coming close being the healing crystals from Psionics), and it would synergise well with itself as you could drain your health to regain mana and then retreat to step on some mines, but it would still require knowing what you want to do (which is what I'd expect from a capstone ability).

 

Kazeto: I like your idea for level 2 and your modification of essence's for level 5. No comment on 3. Your level 2 change still lowers its effectiveness 4-7.5%, but that isn't overly much and I like the added RNG element.

 

Well, the "3" one is because it is possible to barricade oneself or get to a point where one doesn't really have to move not to allow enemies to reach him (Unliving Wall, or just spamming stuff like Sandstorm and/or TFB, or even just drawing a celestial circle on top of all that), so ranged attacks are the only thing that works. And +5 mana regeneration with +10 magic resistance for 50 turns without any "real" drawbacks does seem kind of abusable.

 

I don't think Magic Training needs 2 spells which seriously increase your magic regain, since you get the max boost (1 mp per turn) after only 1. Also, cutting your MP in half is a pretty big price for Certamen Duelist. That's a lot of mana, and it becomes overwhelmingly huge late game. Compare Celestial Circle, which gives comparable (arguably much better) buffs for only 15-1.5 sag and 1 more mana every 3 turns. I'd prefer something closer to that. Maybe 15-.1sag and an upkeep of 1 every 5 turns.

 

That's...complicated. Is it necessary enough to warrant that level of complication? Keeping in mind these are vanilla skills.

Eh. We've already got a "increased magic power but decreased magic resistance" mechanic in Extraplanar Concentration; I don't know that I want to duplicate that in another skill tree. I could switch it to Haywire, i suppose?

Now that's definitely too complicated to lay on a vanilla player. Way too complicated. I was worried enough about giving a vanilla player an ability that had two different effects depending on where you target it; right now that's the exclusive domain of Archmage. I'm actually worried enough about it that I'm considering replacing it completely (with an ability that basically says "destroy all corpses within template101 radius -- gain 2 mana per corpse destroyed in this fashion", giving AoE nuker-mages a reason to chase up the tree despite it's melee-oriented middle levels.)

 

This is a very good point, and honestly I don't play mages enough to be keenly aware of it. I'll suggest some further modifications based on this input in the next couple of days.

I don't think that Discover Ley Nexus would really obsolete booze. Not unless people really want to stand still and press spacebar endlessly (which they can do anyway if they care that much.) Thaumaturgic Tap restores mana on the go; Ley Nexus is more like a Celestial Circle for mana -- you cast it and then you settle in for a fight.

Your first sentence and your second sentence are at odds. Certamen Circle gives you 1 mp/turn because it drains 50% of your mana, and you have to cast it where you want to make a stand. Without the MP boost (which I almost made an independent DoT of +1 mana per turn, but decided to tune it down), the drain would be too much -- but I thought that a boost that big to Magic Reflect needed a pretty decent drawback. It's one thing to put it on a Warrior skill (swords Blocks-All Stance), but a very different thing to put it on a spell that's for characters who always intended to sit back and pelt you to death from a distance.


Also, I intended for some of these things to have Mana costs as well. Don't know how I left those out; I'll have to update when I update.