Ok, so I'm making good on my promise to mod up a nice skillset, and I do have ideas for fun, flavourfull skillsets. The skills will be more on the "joke" side than on the "powergaming" allthough I probably need help on the "you cant give players X and Y too easily" or "this will need some mechanical meaning" front, and it's appriciated. Flavour text ideas and jokes wellcome, nothing is necessarily fixed into place yet. So The Alienist somewhat defined: Class: Wizard Flavor: Recreating the "Shadow Over Innsmouth" or "Rats in the Walls" mold of Lovecraft stories in which the protagonist discovers that he in fact has monstruous ancestry. Mechanical aim: Give players a way to start of with a Lutefisk cube, a way to interact with the rare "Other" taxa, grind lutefisk for fisking and thus increase the meaningfullness of the Lutefisk statues. Abilities that scale with - giving mages a way to spot mines, and a tree which cares about it. Art: An artist buddy of mine is considering giving me a hand with it. He's trying to decide how good can he copy the game's original style. I hope it works out. Total stat bonuses : 8 X Trap Sense, +4 Asphyxative resist, +2 Savvy, +3 Spellpower, - 6 Putrefying resist Starting equipment: The Horadric Lutefisk cube. 1) They are after your box! 2 X "You keep noticing the slimes and the doppelgangers eyeing your box covetuously, you almost feel like they are out to kill you! And take your box! What do they know? You have to investigate this!" Active: Damages nearby opponent for 3 X + 0.2 X , cost 12 mana. 2) By God, they are full of lutfisk! 1 X "It is no wonder the slimes want your box! They are made of lutefisk!" Proc on kill: "Other" monsters drop an ammount of lutefisk, either a fixed one, or a scaling one depending on wether I can make the ammount of items scale to trap sense. Really, really low chance proc on kill: Monsters drop a deep omlette or a gargle blaster. 3) Digging through musty tomes 2 X , +1 " But what is lutefisk made of? And where did the steal all the sweet chow from? Have to investigate this... *munch* *munch* " Passive: + 10 XP when killing Other type monsters. Passive: Lutefisk heals a mana point when eaten 4) Practical application of knowledge repositories 1 X , -1 " All that reading did little to ease your mind, but you sure picked up a few things. Some of them itch." Activated: If you have a tome equipped you gain equal to your . Or to 3 + (0.5 of your ). Consumes 1 mana every 5 steps in the first case maybe?. 5) This place is a deathtrap! 1 X , + 2 , +3 , +1 -2 Passive buff proc chance: proc chance to gain "F'tagn!" debuff which gives you 100% 1 hit brittle debuff, with damage equal to 3 X " What were your ancestors thinking messing with stuff that comes from this place? If it wasn't for the friendly local fish god who keeps whispering survival tips, you'd be going mad! " 6) Lutefisk for the Lutefisk God! 2 X , +2 , -3 Activated: "Hypothalasal detonation" - AoE nuke with lingering steam which confuses. Numbers to be determined, except it does damage based on your trap sense, as well as asphyxative damage to which you are resistent, but leaves a putrifying could leaving you in big problems. "You are not! Taking! The box! F'tagn yourselves, creeps! LUTEFISK FOR THE LUTEFISK GOD!" So much for now, have to see if I'll be getting the art or not. b) The Troll Class: Warrior Flavor: Mechanicaly recreating the operating principles of a devious denizen of the intrawebs. Mechanical aim: Give players focusing on a defensive build somethign fun to do with dodge and block procs (and possibly counter, though that doesn't seem to need any help), but chefly to make use of the myriad useless buffs from consumables and fountains. Skill ideas: 1) Insane Troll Logic: Turning all your buffs into debuffs which affect you. Nasty ones. That's the core, and has coding issues, but I'm willing to bust my head making this work and not break the haematic phylactery. Passive buffs to be discussed, simply to not make this "useless" skill at least marginaly usefull on low levels Only works on actuall buffs, and turns them into class specific debuffs. You should be able to use this to "weaponize" food, dring, potion, fungus and fountain buffs which are about to run out. 2) Completely missing the point Uppon a sucessful dodge moves a random class specific debuff / a number of them to whoever missed him. 3) Don't feed the troll! Upon a sucessful block moves a random class specific debuff / a number of them to whoever they just blocked. 4) Walking skinnerbox! Give all the monsters adjacent to you a buff which causes them to hit you twice with every attack for reduced damage. This one is optional, and could be moved, just another flavourfull one 5) Epic Win! Gives a proc chance to make your counters debuff stuff the way your dodges and block does, for a number of turns. 6) You win the intratubes! Gives you a custom consumable simmilar to the haematic phylactery that uses the brass piping png, and a really, really small proc rate to get one to drop off a sucesfull whatever. With a small enough proc rate, this could be made to work like the original "removes all debuffs" thingy. Passives: If the entire concept is completely unbalanced on it's own, giving it negative fire resistance (Kill it with fire!) at every level should do the trick, but fun can be had with various self inflicted debuffs. Negative acid resistance could also figure into it c) The Highwayman Class: Rogue Flavor: It's a land based pirate! Only less glamurous... Playing with the "Our freedom fighters are bound to be someones terrorists", and drawing upon RL banditry legendry (British, American, Balkaneeze and all that) Mechanical aim: If I did in fact work out how to "refresh" Inconsequentia shrines, that's one thing, otherwise it's mostly flavour and a really fun "getaway" alternative to teleporting and invisibility. Skill ideas: 1) The Dashing Rogue Flavour: "Run up to people, hit them upside the head, and nick their stuff!" Gives the player ability to "dash" simmilar to how rutabagas do it. Should be good against spellcasters. If it also made all the "bars" passable somehow in a "prisons cant hold you" manner, it would give pure rogues a nice way to grab stuff which is behind bars on lower levels (and could be made to work as a blink-strike ability). 2) The Sidelines Of History Flavour: "Apparently it takes having a boat to have your actions remembered as concequential!" Mechanics: I'm working on a way to refesh inconsequentia statues which would allow for playes to get more "Inconsequent" quests. 3) Fade into the crowd! Flavour: "Your fool proof disguise makes you truly inconspicuous! Disguize yourself as a monster and make your getaway!" Mechanics: Pollymorph yourself into an Evil Clone. All taxa become passive. Lasts a couple of turns. Ok, RL calling, more abilities for the highwayman to be put up, and the Trappist getting covered. Post any ideas, suggestions, concerns, "you can't do this"-es, bits of wisdom, advice and all that, they will be much appriciated
The troll skillset sounds pretty fun with some nice risk/reward tactics, but it might take some effort for the lower levels to be worth using. Most of the time you're fighting it's against hoards of weak enemies, so placing debuffs on individual foes at melee range who are gonna die in a couple of hits anyway is not likely to be worth it. While on the rarer occasions that you're fighting eg. a random named monster, having to debuff yourself first and get smacked even more heavily is still not very likely to be worth it compared to eg. pummeling them with bolts or something. Weaponising your collection of increasingly-near-useless buff items is still an awesome idea though.
True about the potentiall lack of usefullness of the entire approach, but if i made it so that the debuff spreads to more than one enemy it could offer an interesting zoo-clearing option for pure melle guys. And dependiong on how I organize the debuffs (press one button, lose buffs, get bunch of debuffs simmilar to how the degree of drunkeness works and make easch lvl of "trolling" be weaponized) it could probably work As far as I can tell, people load up on buffs before engaging a tough named critter/zoo anyway, and if youre into block/dodge/counter you don't mind pressing a button once the buffs start running out anyway. Mostly it adds a fun factor to the dodge/block builds with occasional potential to be usefull to counter builds.
Well if the debuffs deal nasty effects instead of just DoTs or whatever, then this skill will be good even on things that will die anyway. For example, the debuffs might deal un-reducable damage by reducing max health, they might cause confusion, they might make the monster explode and deal AoE damage. Do have some dud ones too that aren't so nasty and/or are way nastier to you than they are to the enemies, like silence, armor reduction, mana reduction, and the like. Suggestions: Account for the fact that in ideal situations, you're going to burn off all those debuffs fast. Maybe make the first skill have no cooldown. As for the skill not being as good as almost any other option when it comes to nasty enemies, maybe make a costly skill that flings debuffs at ranged targets. Call it "flame war" or something. Give a proc on Resist. This will make the tree way deadly and will make it so that you fling debuffs at more than just the monsters right in your face.
Ok, so the alienist has been fleshed out a bit more in the OP. Need tolook up a better format He's a melle wizard with a decent low level spell, grinds lutefisk and gains XP by killing "Other" monsters, gets a block bonus from having a tome equiped, and ends up protected against asphyxative but vulnerable to putrifying. Most of his spells and abilities scale to his Trap sense level which he gets a lot of, but his end game nuke leaves him in a cloud of putryfying damage he is vulnerable to and needs to get out of. Taking the tree to the point before he starts turning into a rotting fish is decent, and taking it beyond would give power but leave you in trouble with dreadmor. That's the basic idea, but I probably overloaded it, anyone has thoughts? EDIT: Whoops, messed up 5 and 6, fixing right now. Wherever details are missing I'm still not sure, and any good tip can lead to number tweaks
Need help with something - is there a handle that would give a buff when a certain item is consumed? Can't seem to find one, and I'm looking for a way to let you regen 1 mana when you eat a piece of Lutefisk.
Well, it looks that way, yes, if you mean it's not very attractive to level. It's a bit more subtle though. Well, the way i coded it right now, you get a rather powerfull spell (it's at , , X ) at lvl 1, and every level of Alienist increases that damage. With there being very little in the way of low level single target spells (or good ones at any level), this would make the skill tree a go-to utility tree in that regard, and it also synergizes with both See The Sights and Glyph of Imhotep for quite a bit of damage early on (might need a nerf the way it looks from my alpha testing). The spell itself, work titled "Paranoia Blast" is currently being tested around "does big early damage, eats up a lot of mana". If you wan't to spam it, and you do want to spam it, you need sources of mana. If lutefisk can be turned into those, well, then, picking up skills wihch allowed for that becomes a fine thing. Sure, anything can be turned into lutefisk, but most monsters don't drop anything unless youre a BGH, and this way you have an alternative, sort of. The second level would add lutefisk as flavor, but you also get a random big-ass food/drink item at some point (havign trouble with making it work), plus the lesser syzigy from the Gargle Blaster. If you could turn the lutefisk into a way to regain mana for the "Paranoid Blast", and I've maybe just come up with a way to do that, then you can either stockpile it and have a tree that makes Lutefisk God staues useable, or keep spamming the blast with the mana. The third level, XP for "Others" would add some more damage to the blast, but since the Others are rare you don't really need it untill lvl 3 where they are common enough to net you a boost. The exact numbers might need tweaking though. So the first point is deliberately overpowered, the XP isn't really negligable, but the primary purpose is to utilize underutilized game elements (lutefisk, trap sight, exotic damage types) and give synergies with utility skill trees (perception, tourist).
Sure, sure, just, wait untill I make it and then try it out - it's a low restriction tree that gives a lvl 1 nuke, and makes you glad instead of indifferent about the "other" taxa. It's actually worth it (criminal development time though, I know, but when it's done it will be worth it )
Rogue Scientists already love the "other" taxa. that said, i'm quite excited about your idea; I almost made one like it a while back but it turned into Archmage along the way...somehow.
Ok, I think I've figured out a way to make the Alienist work, and add another "seldom used" piece of junk to the mix. I just need one bit of info, or rather a confirmation: I want to make a bunch of new items (number = nuber of tomes in the game + 1 ), but I don't want them showing up anywhere, except as crafted stuff. I suppose this is doable. (or rather I think I don't need help with this ) BUT! I want to add as many recipies for the porta still (with alchemy 0 ofc), but have the recipies not show up anywhere except through Alienist skill levels. Now is THAT doable? Please god let it be doable... (there seems to be no info on, say, communist specific crafts in the wiki, so I'm being a nuisance here again)
If you don't want them to show up, add the 'craftoutput="1"' and 'special="1"' tags. There still is a really low chance for them to show up (unless they fixed it somehow, I never really cared to be bothered by that mishap of the game), but technically speaking them spawning would be almost a miracle. And about the one with recipes, I would say it's impossible but I haven't really checked so that's just a hearsay, and possibly an outdated one.
Eh, from what I've seen all the recipies show up in bookcases, and what I'd do would make a special version of each tome that you could craft with the "invissible tome specific trigger" and possibly a minor buff or whatever. It would work well enough I guess, except flooding the allready flooded recipie pool is not my idea of "functional". And I thought I'd do Alienist first on account of it looking simpler than my other ideas -.-'
