Essential Core Skills Rebalance II: Electric Bungalow

I've been saying this about dual wield. It really does force you to put two points in it. I don't think any skill should be a liability at level 0.

If only we could just change the level 0 of Dual Wield to something really lousy. Something as lousy as the pre-change first level 1 of Assassination. Then you would actually start dual wielding at level 1.

 

Ive got no idea what youre talking a out. Ive played several fighters ghat used DualWeild wiith no extra levels for floors 1-4. You just have to build for it by including things like Perception, Deadshot, or other sources of EDR to offset the penalty. You may FEEL the need to put a point or two in, but mathematically its not actually necessary to do that to improve your total damage throughput with Dual Wield -- especially if you're stacking a weapon skill or two with it.

 

I think what's tripping people up is the need to "break" something about dual wield so eventually it will need to be "fixed" somehow. There's no way around it; that's the current implementation. Taking this skill gives you a massive penalty to EDR that WILL need to be offset by something else (even if that's just more points into DW). I can't think of another skill that works that way. Necronomiconomics is closest, but with patience and extra healing items, you can deal with the debuffs without taking astrology or whatever other skills boost . Here, there's not much of a synergy (in terms of take X and Y gives you a bit more than X or Y provide separately, a la clockwork knights), just a fix (Take X to remove penalty from Y so Y... no longer has a penalty).

I'd be fine with just a drawback that points in the tree will handle, or some bonus that dual-wield and perception might yield together (double vision, perhaps? *cough*), but building in a hobble and justifying it by limiting build choices is just something that, in my opinion, should be avoided. It's the same reason that aetheric deathray is lackluster; it offers very little unless you take it AND wandcraft AND a mana recovery or something... propping up one skill with another just means less choices at creation, because one skill is really designed to take two slots.

TL;DR: justifying a skill as working well only in context of another skill means the first skill is weak or flawed.

 

No. None of you are actually doing the math. Do the math -- even with -20 EDR, you still have a demonstrably greater damage throughput with Dual Wield than without unless your Melee Power makes up a huge chunk of your throughput (I.e. if you're using Platonic Fist.)

For example, a 7-warrior-skill hero will have 14 starting Burliness, or 3 Melee Power. All starting weapons deal 2 dmg. Without Dual Wield, lets say you hit 80% of enemies for 5 dmg per hit, total dmg throughput 4. With Dual Wield, you hit 60% of enemies for 7 dmg. Total dmg throughput 4.2.

Like I said, you may FEEL the need to mitigate the penalty, but the math supports Dual Wield being just fine as it is.

 

Either way it's a very massive penalty that railroads you into taking something to boost your EDR and I don't think the bonus it gives you does enough to mitigate that. If you take it, your first 3 or 4 levels have to be in one of a very small subset of skills with vary narrow abilities that might not help your character, and I agree with Darkmere that that's not a good idea. Maybe if it was -20 EDR at 0, with +10 at 1 and 2, so it was paid off once you put 2 skill points into it, instead of 5. Or even -30 and +15 at each.

Edit: That extra damage is at the cost of your ability to use shields and tomes though. It's not like it's free.

 

Possible to give it 999 duration as well as ~20 "break on get-hit?"

 

You forgot extra damage taken by increased miss chance and discrepancies in enemy dodge stats late in the dungeon. Or skill sets that aren't 7 warrior skill picks. The point remains that, on a melee character, if you don't take skills or points to mitigate this penalty, that's an extra 20 that has to come from somewhere, or trying to hit high-dodge targets is hopeless.. Flat damage isn't everything there is to melee combat.

 

Yeeessss, but now lets think about how much .2 more damage is relative to a SKILL.

 

Darn this christmas break and family. I want more dredmor! The new fungal arts spell mines that scale and don't hurt the player already look hella good on paper. Fungal mushrooms compliment ANY build in the game so be careful how much you buff the pets! .

Even when they die in 2 or 3 hits, you can still use them through strategic placement to force monsters ajacent to you to attack them while you get away as well as a ranged targeted toxic cloud.

 

It's not .2 more damage, it's 5% more damage. And that's while almost half of your damage is from melee power.

There are situations where nearly all of your damage is from your weapons. There are situations where you find a weapon that has cool stuff that you want that isn't damage.

I'm not going to categorically agree with Essence quite so quickly, but there's more soul-searching to be done here than may be immediately apparent. As you go deeper into the dungeon and start using weapons that fire musket balls, crank up your magic power, and deal exotic damage to enemies that have tons of armor, Dual Wield as a 0-level dip might be handier than you think.

I still suspect very strongly that Dual Wield level 0 might in fact be a liability on the first two floors.

Edit: Which, of course, means nothing to how excited I am to give sword+dagger+dual another shot.

 

Thrown, melee, and crossbows all use eh? Even with exotic damage it's still a penalty to hit with any attack except spells. It still has to be overcome somehow, no matter what.

 

Not real important. Dual Wield is meant for hardcore melee fighting, so no need to even really think about thrown or crossbowing.

 

Actually, Darkmere has a good point. :thinking hard now:

Edit: about throwing and archery. The whole 'missing more means taking more damage' thing is flat wrong. Killing less quickly means taking more damage, but thats not what happens. DW improves your dmg thoroughput, so you take less hits.

And skill picks that include Rogue or Wiizard levels actually benefit MORE from dualnwield, because lessnof their dmg comes from Melee Power. Y'all don't u derstand: I chose that scenario because it was BAD for DW and still came out infavor of the skill. Better weapons, less Melee Power, more Nimbleness / EDR from other sources all only improve the argument. Just about the only things that don't work in DWs favor are Plutonic Fist and Viking Wizardry (I.E. stackable nonweapon damage sources)

The whole throwing archery thing though...needs attention.

 

Everyone seems to be playing a character with dual wield (since the tones), while no one said that.
-I am- playing it, and -20 isn't such a great lose: you still shot to death things; I'm hitting Batties, you know. And I have daggers up to level 2 (so it's just +1 ). By the time more EDR is needed, levels in dual wield can be always bought, and so here it goes the penality. In the REAL end, warriors without from many sources will miss things.
Also, maybe you now don't remember how good is dual wield: so good that putting ZERO points into it makes it a reasonable skill for every melee build, really better than shields tomes or whatsoever.

The likeness is really stronger than you think. With patience and extra healing items, you still manage to survive those casual misses. Plus, like necro tree, you can manage to use equipment to lower that penality, so it will become lower and lower the more right equipment you find. The whole Necronomiconomics needs , way more than the skill tree gives to you, and the first level isn't nearly comparable to level0 in Dual Wield, while DW manage to completely erase its penality when you hit capstone. It's like saying lvl0 of weapon skills is too weak because, really, you have to use that single type of weapon, otherwise you get no bonuses.
Please, pay attention to this --> lvl0 <-- because simply name another skill tree in the game which is so good as level0 in dual wield.
Plus, with those procs and the new one, if you build up dual wield (4 point investment) you get AND cookies in the form of more fighting power.
But you have to choise, if you want dual wield or not: if you're planning to never put points into dual wield, this is not a skill for you. Like every skill tree (if you take necronomiconomics and never built that up, it's more useless than everything else).
If you build your character focused on , you have way more ways to delete that penality, and then way more builds viable.

 

Thassa good point. Which suggests that... there is pretty much no situation where having it as a 0-level dip is a liability.

Well then!

Dual Wield is worthless on a keep-away character. Any build with Dual Wield on it is clearly not going to be playing keep-away at all, ever. The entire tree demands close range, so what's the difference with also punishing long range?

 

The point is, the skill tree is supposed to be "completely destroyed" if you don't level it up. It's not about it sucking now (because it doesn't), it's about stopping it from being a take-it-and-don't-put-skill-points-in-it-because-there's-no-need kind of thing, the current method being the only reasonable one (and as someone who tried that in real life, I can tell you that decreased accuracy does make a lot of sense, because most people aren't able to coordinate non-identical attacks with both of their hands without a lot of practice [which is why "beginners" of this art in DoD, namely people with no skill points put into it, have a harder time hitting stuff]).

Which is sort of the point, the skill tree was originally too powerful for what it did because you got all the benefits with no penalties at its starting tier.

And a liability? Please, it's a significant increase in damage, in return for a decrease in accuracy on about the same level, and if you weren't an obstinate moron who tried playing with Dual Wielding the same way you could on the very beginning when it wasn't balanced (basically, don't level it up until there's nothing else you wanted to level up), it quickly started being really useful because these -10 points of EDR mean almost nothing on the third floor (a sane person who took it for damage would put one or two points into it by the time they were on the third floor, really)


The whole thing about Dual Wielding being ruined comes from people who just can't get used to it now being a tree you build around instead of a quasi-supportive one you took for your spare slot. The changes made to it came after a rather long discussion much time ago, and were approved by people testing it originally, and they don't really ruin the skill tree, only bring it to par with other skill trees (even so, it isn't weak by any means). Taking Dual Wielding has just became a conscious decision now, rather than the "ok, so I've got a spare slot, let's take this or that for the tier-0 benefits" kind of thing.

This, so much this.
The skill tree cancels its own penalties if you buy it to the last level, and it's one of the strongest skill trees a warrior can take. The penalties actually do make sense (even the ones to throwing weapons - if you are training to dual wield, you forgo using only your dominant hand in favour of using them both equally, and thus throwing things with one hand tends to become more difficult until you get through your training; a lot of truly ambidextrous people who still haven't trained themselves to overcome that have this problem), and people complaining that "it makes you miss things" really miss the point of the whole thing because the penalties are cancelled out in the end and thus any loss of EDR is only a potential one "because you could have taken Perception for that slot instead".

And getting into Lorrelian's (great) skill tree descriptions from another topic, Dual Wielding has just become an engine instead of a turbocharger now - you can't use it the same way you used it before, and if you do, you are likely to fail. But use it right, and it's still a monster to unleash.

 

Changing subject.
It seems that pets cannot proc spells even if they are subjects of buffs.
This crushes my hopes.

 

I'm wondering -- and this is Kazeto levels of crazy -- if a ThrownBuff would apply a +20 edr bonus to the throw that triggered it, in the form of a 0-turn buff...which would then haveto magically reduce itself later

 

It's possible, and not even all that difficult (one buff for the tier-0 that gives you +20, and then one for every subsequent tier giving you -5).

But really, as I explained before, it does make sense for ranged attacks to suffer too - by choosing to wield two weapons at once, you forgo the use of your dominant hand, and thus until you get some degree of mastery of your newly-gained ambidexterity, you are going not to be as dexterous as you were.

 

Speaking of Deadshot, is there a list of its mechanics somewhere?