Something is wrong with this skill tree. It is just seems very underpowered and not unique at all. You want crippling wounds/bleeding out/enemy dodge reduction? Go get it on your weapon skills, which had lots of other bonuses. You want high critical chance? Go get it from Assassination, which had lots of awesome procs. Even the descriptions of the skills themselves paled compared to almost all other skills' descriptions. Very straightforward aka boring. I hereby nominate this the Worst Skill Tree Ever. Can someone PLEASE prove me wrong?
Yes. Ley Walker. Almost completely useless, especially at Going Rogue. +13 maximum mana and regenerate 1 mana over 6 turns instead of 9? And they want 3 skill points for it?
I hereby second Ley Walker. Three skill points for Mana Regeneration you are going to get from items anyway? A little extra mana? There are other Wizard skills that offer much bigger bang for your buck. Deadshot is not astounding but its benefits stack with Weapon Skills and Assassination which can contribute towards a Critical/Proc based build for some pretty brutal results. Crippling Wounds stacks with itself and can turn a dangerous boss into a kitten, and bleeding out not only does initial damage which can contribute to a one or two hit kill but you can kite an enemy for pretty heavy damage over time.
Also, as the picture implies, it works with ranged attacks, so you can soften up those tough guys by shooting them / throwing at them til they get crippled a couple times, summoning pets/rock columns/rooting them if they get too close before you properly debuff them. However it could probably be made more useful overall. And omg yes ley walker is pretty terribad as is. Get fungal instead and get yourself some mana shrooms. lol.
Oh well, there goes my plan to "stealth buff" this skill...joking of course BTW, some interesting answers that I got here. Since I loved proving myself wrong also, I will go make 1 build which used Deadshot as the main skill! A counter/crit/proc build seems to be pretty fun... But hey, at least Ley Walker's concepts are pretty cool! Very aesthetic too! Something about drawing power from "ley lines" etc etc. Though, to buff it a bit, maybe it should give health regeneration as well?
No, because at the scale that this game uses regeneration of any kind is a useless stat to grant. You'll get all the regeneration you want from items, but that doesn't really matter - because even if you get your mana/hp regen up to the maximum, you're just not going to sit around hitting space bar and waiting for your bars to refill. You'll eat and drink to get them back. Now, if we could pump regen up to the point where you get multiple points back per turn, that might be worthwhile - but I think the limit is like 1 point per 4 turns or so, and that gets worse at higher difficulties. Regen is just not a useful stat with the game balanced like this.
I agree with Tacroy, even with regeneration bonuses its rather useless to invest in as it is right now. If you have the time to wait for regeneration anyway, chances are that you dont really need it boosted right then.
I support using regeneration ITEMS since you can achieve 1 Health or 1 Mana regeneration every single step. However, Skill Points are pretty important early in the game and there are better things to invest in than regen. When you get to the point where your skills are not as vital then you've probably already maxed your regen. Critical Builds are fun! I did a Maces/Deadshot/Assassination/Berserker Rage/Vampirism/Archaeology/Smithing and absolutely destroyed everything, including Dredmor. I did not take Dual Wield because it's buggy. I took Smithing to ensure I had double Iron Thorn Rings and early Aluminum Armor. Dwarven Handshake was amazing with this build. In retrospect, I probably could have skipped Berserker Rage and gone with a spell casting tree. Perhaps Viking Magic for a higher chance of one shot kills, or something to heal. Perhaps Fungal Arts instead of Vampirism would fulfill my healing AND utility needs, but I had just finished playing a character with that and wanted a change.
Ley Walker is pretty powerful, it's tough to get the mana regen capable of spamming some of the high level spells, Ley Walker helps a ton with that. Regardless of being able to find mana regen on items. The point is that Deadshot is trivialized due to how weak it is.
Ley Walker is not powerful because there is a hard cap on the amount of mana you can regenerate during a turn. It is pretty easy to find items that regenerate mana, ESPECIALLY if you have Archaeology. Once you find those items, the entire skill does -nothing- except grant you a tiny amount of mana.
If you think Ley Walker is anywhere near worth it and helps to fuel high mana spells then you probably don't realise how mana regeneration works. Magic Training and Blood Mage both provide Magic Power, which reduces the mana cost of spells and increases their damage. Even if you ignore the damage increase and assume the entirety of Magic Training/Blood Mage only reduces mana costs by one... is it better to save one mana on every casting, or is it better to regenerate one mana every 6 turns instead of every 9 turns? And this is not taking into account damage boosts and the fact that Magic Training usually reduces mana costs by more than one, and Blood Mage also provides four mana (which with maximum Ley Walker takes 24 turns to regenerate) per kill.
what makes Blood mage more valuable to a mage that relies on damage spells is the fact that getting mana back after a kill is more useful than regenerating the mana when your using spells... where as if the mage does not really use attacking magics, I can see ley walker being at least a little viable, as you likely wont need the mana on the spot the same way an attacking mage would. In other words, damaging mage =/= ley walker, and utility mage COULD use ley walker.. and even then its just barely viable at all anyway
^ That's probably a good way to think about it, but the question then becomes... if you're only using magic for the occassional utility, why on Earth would you need a mana-boosting skill?
You probably wouldn't anyway. Basically saying, Ley Walker is almost, in all aspects, completely useless. If you were using attack magics, you would be better off with maybe another magic ability. If you only use magic for utility purpose you would be better off with another support skill (I.E. crafting, melee, or anything rouge.) a good substitute for a mana booster while having melee as your main form of damage output, you'd do well to have the mushroom ability for the buffs.
Having Ley Walker a couple times, I'd say it needs drastic buffs. Fungal Arts not only will provide you with more mana, but a shitload of buffs for the entirety of the game. The only benefit of Ley Walker is that it is passive and doesn't require tedious spore farming. I don't think +3 mana regen is useless at all. You need +9 total on GR to get 1 mana per turn, and you absolutely should shoot to accumulate that much as early as possible. But I think you should get to +3 regen with the second point, all three ranks should give more passive total mana, and the third should be a cooldown that gives you a ton of magic power and haywire as a buff (maybe ~50% uptime) to give you a large amount of mana efficiency from this tree.
Minor mistake in Wallach's post. Steps for 1 mana base: Elves - 5 steps Dwarves - 7 steps Rogue - 9 steps So you need 4/6/8 mana regen to get 1 per step.
Which is another problem with Ley Walker. It scales horribly with difficulty. At Elves it might be somewhat worth it (then again it might not as it's much easier to get full regen with equipments), but at GR its effects are almost negligible alone. But anyways. Buffs are coming for both skills.
I myself don't think ley walker is any good, especially in comparison to other skills, but deadshot is pretty damn cool when combined with assassination. I tried out a new melee oriented hero and I've gotten further into the game than any other prior save. The bleed has saved me a couple of times when ive been surrounded. But hey, buff it more!
Well, kinda expected this thread to be derailed anyway, so I don't really mind that much, heh. Anyway, suggestion for dev to make this skill (Deadshot) less lame: Please add/modify 1 skill to make 1 attack uncounterable, unblockable, undodgeable. I don't care how long the cooldown will be, sometimes I'm just ONE HIT AWAY from killing a monster, before he double-hit (counter + normal hit) and killed me.
