The Encrustador. AKA encrusting is overpowered.

So here is my current gear:



I've done quite a bit of encrusting. This is supposed to be dangerous but if you encrust enough and have the right resistances (I'm actually missing necro resistance here, but with that I have all I need) what should be dangerous elements just become overpowered buffs.

Every time I hit anything, every single time without exception, I explode. Twice. Then I set off two massive tentacle eruptions (think bolt of squid), then I teleport twice at random, one after the other. After this I often hit again, I think due to my clockwork ravager. This means that if I teleport next to another monster I often hit them and cause more explosions and tentacle eruptions before teleporting off again. After all this has happened whatever I hit finally accepts the enormity of my absurd damage and dies. This can lead to some hilarious things, such as clearing out a room full of monsters with a single attack.

If anything hits me, I explode, set off tentacle eruptions, and teleport at random. If I counter-attack (which is often) then the above happens and sometimes my clockwork limbs go on a rampage. If I'm surrounded when this happens I explode up to eight times.

I'm immune to my own tentacle eruptions and explosions (with the exception of a few points of necro damage at the moment) so I can walk around in the carnage without any issues. Most monsters are not so lucky.

Here I am in a fresh diggle hell room:



I attack the closest diggle and shit gets real and I'm teleported across the room. I stab the diggle on that side as well.



More chaos and then it teleports me outside the room. I open the door to this:



That was two attacks.

So yeah, encrusting is overpowered.

I'm currently making a new character built to attain dangerous encrusting levels as quickly as possible and abuse them to maximum effect. Once the required resistances are hit the encrusting 'dangers' just become overpowered bonuses and you can encrust the same equipment to godly levels.

 

Hmm, some resist debuffs as encrust failures could help. You could still keep crafting until you get a tentacular doom or the like and work up resistances to it, but with effects having a lower proc % with the new fixes and the inability to spam encrusts due to resist debuffs that could balance this out.

 

I'd rather see instability procs that tank your resistances to instability procs. Encrusting could still have risk/reward, but the risks would be meaningful if instability going off could give you negative or .

 

Another argument for outright destroying the item.

 

Read this. Twice. This is how legendary equipment is born.

 

I actually think this is cool ; it's the exact same as an OP necro character, if you get what I mean - mitigated risk.

 

man don't get this nerfed before I get to play with encrusting. I haven't messed with crafting much yet. Most of the time I don't have the materials needed to do an encrust. Are you doing rogue scientist and smithing? What else? Which crusts are you using?

 

This build is as follows:

Smithing
Tinkering
Alchemy
Rogue Scientist
Clockwork Knight
Communism
Dual Wielding

I started this character just to explore all the new crafting recipes and crusts but Rogue Scientist is so strong that it turned into a serious run. I find it almost impossible to play any character without crafting skills though. They are just too powerful.

As for encrusting I put anything I have materials for on the weapons. Since I'm actually aiming for dangerous levels of encrusting I just shove everything on there. I put most of my iron into spikes on my gloves as this effects both ranged and melee.

Something I do with every character is stash all the steak for gaga's glaze, which is extremely strong. You can get about +20hp on an item without risking any instability, so doing this on 3 items is a free +60hp. Never eat any steak and buy out all the steak from food machines for half the game till you find a good item and then buff it out.

For armour I used the gold + silver + platinum crust for the +2 AA, copper crusting for the +2 block and heavily abused the alchemical ooze and bitumous coal crust so that the massive -nimbleness is nullified. My chest armour has about -29 and +30 nimbleness on it or something silly, resulting in +1.

 

The mind be boggled.

 

I think every item should have an encrust threshold stat, which allows for a min/maximum number of encrusts per item.

 

My suggestion in the last thread like this that came up was to make it so you can't encrust the SAME encrust on an item more than once. That probably is really important because you can't overuse Very Holy Shield to become immune to half the instability effects if you can only have it once per item.

This may not be enough, but it's probably a good start

 

Would it be possible for instability procs to scale to a person's total instability? 'Cause then you'd probably never get ahead on resists just by encrusting.

 

@Darkmere : But destroying the item wouldn't be *fun*. Not even of the dwarf fortress variety.
@Wootah : I'd also recommend, strongly, Perception for any craft heavy build. I didn't realize it until recently, but Perception has been buffed to give you LOTS of loot drops, at least half of which are important crafting reagents. (It's also just a super convenient skill because of the sight and trap sight radius boosts.)
@Ruigi : That makes sense, but seems a little ... inelegant. It's essentially giving up and accepting that instability is unbalanced. It may have to come to a hard encrust cap. But exponential instability increases with identical encrusts on top of linear instability increases with different encrusts ought to be enough if the instability effects are chosen wisely. (I still think throwing in resistance decreases is a good one, throw one or two in on top of whatever else is going on; or have increasing resistance decrements with increasing stability.
@Lorrelian : That's an interesting idea. Or at least have the damage scale to the item's instability, or the players' resistances modulo the item's instability...

 

I didn't mean destroying an item, really. I'd say a failed encrust adding penalties would be closer to destroying an item than what I meant. I meant to say there should be some instability effect that makes sure stacking it is actually dangerous, instead of the OP's situation.

 

I've never bothered with encrusting before, but now I'm very much interested.
What do you think would be an ideal build for it?

 

Just to play devil's advocate, by the time you are able to achieve this there are a number of ways to have a character that dominates the game. It's not like you are simply turning god mode on. It took a lot of effort/time to make this happen.

 

But rather than abuse certain, possibly broken skills, you get to play as a teleporting, tentacle-summoning beast.

Still looking for a build. I've never tried this so I don't really know what would go good with it...

 

I agree with this. If you can get to the stage when you can stack encrusts with no fear (excepting the stupidity of dodge encrusts) you can get to game-rape status with other skills too.

 

Killjoy. I agree something very serious needs to get done, but I hope your nerfing is nuanced. I'd rather not see the power of encrusting removed, but the disadvantages multiplied greatly as the power increases.