Flesh-mancy seems to be a bit weak...

So I made a warrior/flesh-mancer character. He's still alive and hacking stuff up (mainly due to his warrior skills) but the flesh magic seems rather weak.

Meat shield is not bad I suppose- I have to keep recasting it of course, but it makes me stronger. The faster healing helps a little, but not enough to be very significant below Dlevel 2 I think. Flesh bore... well, it does not do much damage. Not sure how effective it is as a debuff otherwise, but it doesn't seem to return much for the mana cost.

Knit Flesh was very disappointing. It costs me 9 mana, but only heals 3 hit points (!?). To add insult to injury, it debuffs you as well for a few rounds. Right now I am on DLevel 5 and a healing of just 3 hit points is virtually worthless, even if I have time to sit around and let mana regenerate. I think maybe instead of just debuffing, the spell should also give you rapid HP regen for a few rounds- that way it is not an insta-heal spell, but it is at least worth the mana cost + debuff.

I haven't tried the last two spells (corpse burst and the zombie-making spell), but up to this point the skill tree is a bit of a waste.

As a final note, I mention again that my character is not a focused spellcaster. His magic power stat is 11, so perhaps he just sucks at magic? Regardless, it seems the tree could probably use a bit of tweaking.

 

Eh the Zomby summon isn't the best.
Corpse burst is ok but situational, also on a warrior why bother as most enemies will be dead next to you and hitting will be more damaging.

The last spell (some kind of area effect gas) is pretty good, but nothing special.

 

Yeah so my dude finally died on Level 5... having invested a fair amount of time into the flesh-mancy + melee skills on GR difficulty, I would say that Meat Shield is pretty useful early on at least, flesh bore seems to be useless almost (not sure how nasty it debuffs, but it doesn't seem to be too dramatic), and knit flesh pretty worthless (9 mana traded for 3 HP is only going to get you slaughtered in the middle of combat, plus there's that debuff).

I think either flesh knit and flesh bore are bugged, or they simply need serious rebalancing. Meat shield is good early on, but later on it's not really essential. I suppose it might be better if these skills were to scale when you have intermediate or better magical power; for instance it would be nice if meatshield could improve with magical power somehow (either larger buff, or barring that, make it more durable).

Still having fun with the game!

 

In my experience it's a completely worthless skill. Not worth putting points into, and therefore not worth picking up over far more valuable skills. The best skill in the entire tree is the shield, and it's only good early game.

 

Knit Flesh is kind of weaksauce, but it actually heals for 6 HP. It's kind of funky how it's done, though.

(1). Cast Knit Flesh, your current HP goes up by 3 points.
(2). You get that debuff that lasts 5 turns, it cuts your maximum HP back by 3 points. Note, however, that it does not reduce your current HP by 3 points.
(3). After 5 turns, both your maximum HP AND your current HP increase by 3 points.

Example: You start out at 30 / 40 HP and rather than eat one of your 500 pieces of lutefisk, you decide to cast Knit Flesh. You notice that (1) and (2) of the above happens together, and you're left with 33 / 37 HP with that 5 turn debuff on you. Assuming you don't naturally regain health after 5 turns, the debuff wears off and (3) kicks in, you're left at 36 / 40 HP; 6 health points higher than you started with!

Meat Shield is, in my opinion, a very dangerous buff to have on (especially on Going Rogue difficulty) because it initially grants you 10 HP to your current and maximum pools, but it takes both away when it expires. If you get hit when your HP is 10 or less and the buff goes away, you die!

EDIT: Or, in hindsight, Knit Flesh probably does give you 6 HP and it just cuts both current and maximum down by 3 HP for the time of the debuff. Meh!

 

Well, meat shield is sort of dangerous early on, but I found that at intermediate levels it was not dangerous. One thing that is good about it is the +3 (or is it +2) heal and +brawn, so it not only gives more HP, it also makes you fight better and heal faster. Not a huge bonus, but it's not nothing. However, I do feel like the bonuses should scale up.

What Darth said about knit flesh is correct, in retrospect. Still, it seems like a pretty weak trade-off for HP to Mana. I imagine healing spells are hard to balance well in a game like this, but I think this needs a bit of work. Maybe a massive +heal bonus with the debuff would be better.

 

If it only heals 6hp it seems pretty weak. :/
For comparison the Psionics Crystal Healing is roughly about 5hp per tile and you get 9 tiles so you end up with 45 hp gain.
Without a debuff.

 

Knit Fresh is suppose to be better than this. It should also heal over 6 turns but the healing line is bugged at the moment. I reported it on beta and is currently on the todo status.

 

I've tried a couple of Fleshsmithing builds and have never gotten past Floor 3 or so. I find it to be an exceedingly underwhelming "spell" tree, for the reasons already listed. The last time I tried a Fleshsmith I died when Meat Shield wore off.

I haven't touched that skill since.

 

Well if knit flesh gets fixed, it would probably be worth it just for that spell... too late to help poor Meatzerker, but maybe next build.

 

While Flesh seems to be a bit underwhelming overall, Fleshbore is a bit more powerful than I originally thought. You get it early (one point investment), and it stacks up to three times. With the low cost, you can finish most things in 2 or 3 castings, similar (but inferior) to Recursive Curse. I took a Flesh/Golem build to Floor 10 with Fleshbore as the main damage skill, using the Miasmatic Cloud as area effect support. Yeah, you can get throwables that duplicate the cloud, but it works alright for clearing large groups. Fleshbore doesn't have the staying power of Invive Thaumite Swarm, but it doesn't bite you in the ass (you can't kill yourself accidentally with it) and Thaumite Swarm doesn't stack (as far as I know), unlike Fleshbore.

 

I think Meatshield (and a lot of other buffs that go away after a certain number of hits) should make a distinction between melee attacks against the character (subtracting 1 from the count) and other damage sources like acid, fire, poison, necro, etc., and it should also be set up so that only 1 stack can be removed per turn. I really tried to like Fleshsmithing, the idea itself was great, but the implementation seems lacking. The first character I ever played had Necronomiconomics and Fleshsmithing, and I must have died 10 times from Deathly Hex eating my Meatshield stacks, even though I had enough Necro resist that I wasn't taking actual -damage-. I've given up on it until it gets reworked.

 

It's also annoying to lose "hits" from kicking a door, which AFAICT is unmitigatable damage.

 

An unstoppable force is meeting an immovable object and you expect that 2 damage to be mitigatable!?

For shame.

 

No, no, I just don't want to lose charges on my defensive buffs if they aren't actually doing anything.

 

Knit Flesh was pretty okay before this patch broke the heal-over-time effect. It healed for three up front, then one per turn for six turns, then another three at the end when the debuff faded. Also, you could spam it repeatedly without the debuff stacking, so casts after the first heal the full six up front in addition to making the extra healing per turn stronger. Given how rare infinitely renewable healing is (I think the only direct competition is Crystal Healing), it was a nice thing to have. I don't know if it ever scaled with magic power, though, which is a problem.

The rest of the school is still pretty lousy compared to the competition, though. Meat Shield ranks somewhere between "worthless" and "assisted suicide" in general usefulness due to the fact that you lose the ten current health when it fades; the limited number of hits should just be taken out completely. Fleshbore is better than nothing, but weaker than almost every other direct damage spell, so unless Fleshsmithing is your only school of magic, it'll never get cast (Arctic Vortex, for example, seems to do about double the damage for the same mana cost). Corpus Burst sounds neat, but it only does like six AoE damage when you first get it...a fraction of what Obvious Fireball does on top of being inherently unspammable due to the nature of the targeting. The zombie is one of the weakest summons in the game statistically, comes far too late, and can't even be summoned at will due to the corpse restriction (meaning you can't whip it up to tank in a rough situation, which is all summons are good for late-game). I've never learned the last skill, but I assume it's bad on the grounds that it's based on a broken mechanic (poison clouds and the like don't deal damage to anything in them if they're standing still or attacking rather than moving).

Fleshsmithing just isn't better than any other magic school at anything it does except maybe healing (before this patch broke it). Its damage spells are some of the worst in the game, its defensive buff is the worst in the game, its pet is the worst in the game...even if Knit Flesh was fixed, Crystal Healing in Psionics is still pretty comparable, and Psionics offers some amazing utility in terms of crowd control (including a damaging 3-turn stun which I'm pretty sure was unresistable last time I checked). I'd really like to see it reworked.

Part of the problem is that Fleshsmithing doesn't really have a role, like most other spell schools do. Necronomiconomics has the strongest spells everall, but nasty backlash; Mathemagic has the best single-target damage (plus teleports), Promethean has the best AoE damage; Golemancy has the best summons; Psionics has the best CC and overall utility; Astrology has the best buffs. Fleshsmithing and Viking Magic are kind of just there with no real direction, except Viking Magic is mostly okay because it at least has some strong, no-nonsense, highly mana-efficient offensive spells to carry it along (even though I don't think it pulls off the "one-stop-shop for battlemages" angle quite as well as it seems to want to).

 

Yeah, it'd be nice to see Fleshsmithing reworked. I always envisioned it a support school, and instead it tries to do a little bit of everything and does it all pretty poorly.

 

Miasmic Putrefaction is weak simply because it dishes out the two most commonly resisted damage types in the game: Toxic (Sickly Diggle(2), Toxiblobby(4), Zomby(10), Unfriendly AI(10), Magicky Golem(10), Unhealthy Golem(10), Golden Golem(10), Flaming Golem(1), Robo(10), Lord Dredmor(20)) and Asphyxiative (Zomby(10), Unfriendly AI(10), Steamy Golem(10), Magicky Golem(10), Unhealthful Golem(10), Golden Golem(10), Flaming Golem(10), Robo(10), Lord Dredmor(20)).

Why does Miasmic Putrefaction not do Putrefying damage (only resisted by blobbies)? Seems Putrefying and Acidic would be much more effective.

Knit Flesh could be fixed by giving it a Fairywodger-equivalent heal, along with a cooldown and a Lingering Weakness-type debuff. Meatshield could be made somewhat better by taking away the 5-hit meter (any spell you might have to recast every 2-3 turns in melee is annoying),

For example, this has killed me several times on level 1:
-Turn 1: (I am boxed in by two Bats. Assume Bats take 4-5 turns to kill) Meatshield is up, I hit once, I am hit twice. (Meatshield 3 stacks)
-Turn 2: I hit once, I am hit twice. (Meatshield 1 stack)
-Turn 3: I must recast Meatshield else it will fall off. I am hit twice (Meatshield 3 stacks)
-Turn 4: I hit once, I am hit twice. (Meatshield 1 stack)
-Turn 5: I must recast Meatshield else it will fall off. I am hit twice (Meatshield 3 stacks)
-Turn 6: I hit once, kill one Bat. I am hit once. (Meatshield 2 stacks)
-Turn 7: I hit once, I am hit once (Meatshield 1 stack)
-Turn 8: I try to recast Meatshield, but am out of mana. I hit once, I am hit once, and having taken 12 hits, Meatshield falls off, I die, my head hits my desk. Had I not bothered with Meatshield at all, likely both bats would be dead by Turn 8 and I would still be alive. :|

Also, changing the order of progression to Fleshbore->Meatshield->Knit Flesh would give Fleshsmiths a weak but decent spell at first level that they can continue to use as their magic power increases, instead of a buff that is annoying to keep up and could conceivably kill them.

 

viking magic is actually incredible. At the moment i belive the vortex and fire runes are overpowered. Vortex can kill just about anything after you get it. Even in floor 7, it was worth using on ice resistant monsters. Mix it with math, you can just vortex everythign to death and stay out of trouble. Out of all the mages i made with fire school, i never actually got anything after fire rune. This skill alone can clear any zoo all the way up to floor 10 because it scales ridiculously well with spell power. And its only a second spell on the tree.

Oh and viking tree gives you 2 permanant buffs, if your a pure mage. I will test the final spell after i get the last level on it but it seems like its very strong for the little amount of mana it takes (looking at the wiki).

Flesh smithing seems useless. The meatshield buff is worthless Unless you become a high level mage with preferably teleport or some other escape mechanism to not get hit very often. Every other skill on the tree seems worthless also.