Also, Bela Lugosi was mentioned heavily by a few bands like Electric Hellfire Club. But I can pretty much guarantee you do not want to hear the song.
Yeah, Bela Lugosi pretty much defined America's ideas about Dracula in the same way that Boris Karloff defined our concept of Frankenstein's Monster. Classic, classic shit.
It actually applies to most of the old black and white monster movies, whether it's about vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, or any other sort of genetic wonder. They are all a true mozzarella-fest, but once you get used to them not having any computer-generated special effects and generally not appearing impressive, they can be just as entertaining as the new stuff, if not more so (because they couldn't pull the viewers in with special effects, so they had to be genuinely entertaining).
Agreed. I especially like the fact that most of those films use a minimum of kerosene. Kerosene is what is actually used for the idiotic explosions that happen everywhere all the time in modern films. You think shooting a gasoline tank with a lead bullet will make it explode with a massive fireball? Then I am sorry to say you are ignorant of the need for oxygen, and the color gasoline burning puts off. If you could somehow make a car gasoline tank burn by shooting it, it would burn for hours before it burned off enough metal to absorb enough oxygen to make a tiny explosion. In the meantime, you could pull up a chair and have a nap while it burned. Then when you wake, you could spray a bit of water over it and extinguish it entirely in seconds. Hollywood and the modern movie industry is staffed with morons. Purely. No-one with half a brain is qualified to make a modern film. If you do not believe in Mcguyver (Spelling?) logic and spontaneous explosions everywhere at the drop of any hat, then you are too smart for movies.
Having collected my thoughts, and waiting during the windows install, this is how I would change vampirism to make it complementary to more play styles/builds and more fun all around. Goals for my suggestions Make the Tree more fun Strengthen The weakest skills Make the tree more defined into a specific role - in this case sustainability Level 1 Skill. Blood Sucker Your melee attacks are stronger and drain life from your enemies. Being undead, you are more resistant to common physical attacks. Passive Bonuses. +1, +1 Vampirism Attack - Passive on Hit -Drains Life Vs Demons 1 (+0.6x) -Drains Life Vs Animals 2 (+1.0x) -Drains Life Vs Others 1 (+0.4x) Life Sap Effect 1. You gain 1, enemy loses 1. Unresistable. Spoiler: Reasoning and Commentary Adding the single passive armor makes sense from gameplay and for lore. Early game it has a massive effect on the first floor, where many a vampire build dies (I know from experience). This armor allows more flexibility in builds. Late game this additional single armor will mean nothing. With regard to lore, Vampires were relatively tough cookies in a fight, able to take most wounds without losing much killing stride. I thought about adding a - for flavor such as getting stake in the heart, but this would make them much tougher on the first floor Finally, the Life Sap effect would replace the regen life effect 1. As Essence pointed out it is broken, and I think that the vampire really should get 1 HP for effort. BUT, seeing as how everything in the game is animated in one form or another, I am alright with dread evil being being able to drain the life force out of any animated enemy. Since it is simply a loss of a single , it is not subject to damage types. This would make the vampire slightly better on earlier floors, with an attack that isn't subject to any defense in the game. As far as I am aware there are no effects that aren't debuffs that reduce , so that seems 'fun' to me. Correct me if I am wrong. Level 2 Skill. Drinker of the Dead Drains a corpse of its blood to gain (un)life and Mana. Bottoms up! Corpse Drain - Targeted ability - 4 Second Cooldown Must be 1 square from target corpse Heals for 3 +(0.25x) Restores 2 +(0.20x) Spoiler: Reasoning And Commentary Currently the Drinker of the Dead is the Bread and Butter of Vampirism's survival on early floors, which is the only reason it is playable due to the weakness of the current first skill. Even for builds with reasonable , It is the only way to survive when fighting vs undead monsters and constructs where draining isn't going to happen. To make the tree more appealing to casters, who aren't going to be benefitting from melee combat, it should restore a reasonable amount of health (when not getting hit directly) and more importantly mana. Before you object to the mana restoration, consider that most viable warrior builds using vampirism don't have any skills that would take advantage of the mana gain anyway. What it could 'potentially' do is add a third mana generating ability somewhere in the middle of the road between Ley Walker and Blood Magic. I wrote out a lot of comparisons at different , but instead, It will suffice to say that the ability would be a good complement to playstyles not represented by either Ley Walker or Blood Magic. Early game it would allow for occasional casting, while late game it would allow for more casting (due to cheaper costs with higher ). Vs Zoos it would never be as good as blood magic and due to the 4 second cooldown, would never be overpowered, although Very good late game. At 10 magic power you would be able to restore 4 mana per corpse. This is slightly better than blood magic early game and slightly worse than Thaumaturgic Tap. The 4 second cooldown however would prevent it being extremely useful vs zoos and completely behind Blood magic when fighting large groups or zoos. Only at a late game does it really shine and outstrip Leywalker. Level 3 Skill. Sparkly You can dazzle your enemies to leave them stunned by your spooky, sparkly vampire glamour. This also saps some of their life-force. Because seriously. Sparkly Glamour - Passive %13 Chance on being hit of triggering - Current Sparkly Area hit Drains Life 1+(0.05x ) Damages 1+(0.05x) Sparkly Brilliance - Activated Ability - 32 Second Cooldown Drains Life 1+(0.1x) 90% Chance to Paralyze 4 Turns Spoiler: Reasoning and Commentary Right now this skill is very underpowered. The way I think I have written it, is that it would scale to Current Health. As a bloody vampire wouldn't be very sparkly. It doesn't make sense to be melee range and have it scale to the more total HP you have the better this gets, making it scale well with character level. doing 10% of a player Hp would encourage stacking HP, and late game with 150 Hp, you are still only doing 15 which is not unreasonable. The drain is half that because it can hit multiple targets. This isn't so bad either as being a melee vampire late game is quite tough and the damage output of melee monsters far outstrips the healing gains from life gain on blood sucker, especially if you don't have ridiculously high . Finally the current activateable just stinks. Increasing the paralysis chance works great for getaway, and as an emergency button for healing. If it does scale off current health though you couldn't wait until you are almost dead to heal to full, but provide an interesting tradeoff on when you would want to use it. I think with an much higher chance to paralyze, the duration should be shortened. This skill would actually be very fun as opposed to what it is now. It would also help with zoos for tanky builds and emergencies. Level 4 Skill Psychic Vampire Your spooky vampiric mind powers allow your melee attacks a chance to siphon off mana and wreak confusion in your enemies. Psychic Drain - Passive Ability 100% Chance when you hit in melee: or 25% Chance when you Cast a spell: 100% Chance to Recover 1+(0.1x) 50% Chance to Recover 1+(0.5x) 25% Chance for Confuses - Melee only, Spoiler: Reasoning and Commentary Right now This is the hardest skill to justify. Draining mana in melee combat is only useful to gish characters. Also the current ability has a 50% chance to trigger in combat, meaning anything listed, only happens 50% of the time. combined with the changes above, the vampirisim tree would provide sustainability to the point where players would consider it an option for the sustain that it provided, while still providing a severe penalty with regard to no food. Level 5 Skill (Unchanged) Transylvation You can transform into a batty to make your escape. REEeee! (That's the sound a bat makes.) Batty Form - Activated - 30 Second Cooldown Polymorph Self into a bat. Summons 4 Batty Companions with Evasion Spoiler: Reasoning and Commentary This skill needs no changes. you can feed off your bats, You can use it as an escape with summons, and you can fly. It is a pretty decent capstone skill, especially if the skills this deep were improved. Conclusions I hope that you look these over. I think the game could do for another sustainability tree that is vastly different from things like blood magic or Ley Walker, it would allow new unique skill combinations that currently might not go together. Some of these improvements, the ones that are most drastic in Sparkly and Psychic vampire NEED to be somewhat overpowered, given the great abilities and choices out there in other skill trees and the fact that no other tree has as severe of penalties as vampirism does with regard to food and lifegain.
That is a list of heavy changes. Most are good, but balance is shot to hell with this. I propose this be a mod skill rather than the real thing. That requires a new name for the skill tree. But I am sure you can think of a good one. If you want this to be a core replacement, this is likely to break the game in weird ways that cannot be explained by anyone save Nicholas. Sadly I do not remember enough to know for certain that all of that is even possible. (We have discussed this before.) The main problem that I know of is much of Vampirism is hard coded. Perhaps you already accounted for that and I am wasting my breath. But I figured I should spit it out before anyone got the idea of coding it up at once.
I instead think this is very cool as a change, and I don't see why this should break balance. Maybe a little less with the mana regain from dead bodies, but it's nothing so catastrophic. Also, the only thing I think is hardcoded from vampirism is the impossibility to eat things. After all, everything else are just spells. And vampirism is (should be) a support skill, since the health regain and psychic vampire and stuff. No nukes and whatsoever, so this is really on the skill line, just slight more powerful (and useful). Numbers can be tweaked, after all.
Balance IS shot to hell. That is kind of a point. And while not many people voted in the poll, some people think that it should be buffed (what I voted for). The thing here is that if this really was intended to be a sustain skill, why shouldn't it be competitive with blood magic or Ley Walker? The penalty for Blood Magic (-) is not as severe as no natural healing and No food. There are so many kick ass skills in the game, there has to be something slightly overpowered in each tree to make people want to take it. And as Kazeto points out, no nukes, and numbers can be tweaked. And the changes were suggested so that there wouldn't be too much coding required. Much of them are number tweeks: First level -Adding Passive armor -Reducing enemy health by 1 should be possible using current code that is healing mobs by replacing it with a negative sign and then including Essences Fix from above. Second Level Adding a mana restore to the current ability. Possibly difficult, depending on hardcoding. Third Level Passive proc added to the ability. probably the most coding involved of the suggestions. Scaling based on HP might not follow the level curve and item availability, but the game suffers this in many places. Scaling based off of may be problematic or impossible. Something else could easily be chosen. Fourth Level Number tweaks are easy. Adding the additional possibility to proc on spell cast (taking code from leylines) may be difficult or impossible. Fifth Level No changes. Depending on what essence does with the skill and how fun it is to play, I might actually take a shot of it myself using the dredmor modding wiki. But having never made a mod before, and only tweaked numbers in the code, it would mostly be me trying to borrow from other mods.
None of these changes would be difficult to make. I'm not entirely convinced that they're necessary, though.
Code: <effect type="dot" resistable="0" spell="Regen Mana 3" amount="9" /> Code: <spell name="Regen Mana 3" type="target" > <effect type="spellpoints" amount="3" /> </spell> Taked from extraplanar concentration. So, changing numbers should work. But how to make it scalable? Uhm. Why impossible? It's just a Code: <effect type="damage" damageelement="3" damageelementF="howmuchtoscale" secondaryScale="0" /> secondaryscale="0" is . You know, there is trigger on cast. I don't remember how it works, but Essence knows it for sure (at least Wild Magic works with trigger on cast effects). Yeah, I don't think this is very difficult. The only problem should be the mana regain from Drinker of the Dead, since I don't know how to make it scalable (or if this is even entirely possible). Anyway, we should get some sleep. I SHOULD be studying too. Sleep-studying. After all people ARE complaining about some of these skills, and those are the ones more tweaked from Wootah.
It's supposed to mean that for as long as you start with the skill working on the desired scope (finding out the correct template, percent chance for something triggering, desired taxa, etc.), it's not hard to balance things if we just have some time for testing because the only thing that is left are numbers - buff/debuff durations, damage scaling, etc.. But I'm derailing it. Anyway, Wootah referred to a not-so-fresh post of mine, so it's understandable that some of you feel confused.
wow, my bad Vitellozzo (and Kazeto too), I should probably go back to bed. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but versatility is the father of opportunity (think of the new doors that could be opened here). Vampirism is 'alright', and the mana changes would have almost no effect on the builds that currently work with vampirism. Sparkly currently sucks for all builds and suggested changes might be slightly too strong, but again, they could be subject to tweaks (passive on being hit proc lower chance or whatever). But I have strong feelings about vampirism, especially after trying it with caster builds for a lot of frustrating gameplay. In either effect, You can chalk up these last couple of posts under the 'other, please comment' part of the thread. Thanks for your input for tweaking Vitellozo, I might be coming back here and borrowing some of your comments.
Sparkly really does currently suck. I'm just nervous that people like r_b_b will see the mana-gain parts of Vampirism and think that it's intended to be a blue skill when that's clearly not the case. :thinking lots:
Mh, the mana gain was the most strange of the effects to me too when I first saw that, I admit. Bu with those changes Vampires can be used with lots of different builds, rather than being just a support for "maxing warriors" builds. It could even work with rogue vampires and wizard vampires, just because all that different sources of / gain. Yeah, I can see what you mean here. But after all r_b_b is just a kind of brillant person who can help balancing new stuff, from being too much coloured, with the general idea of the game. He knows things. Yeah, it's singular since we said the same things here I'm 100% agreing with you ^^ Yeah Nacho, I love you and everything, but a little reason why you don't agree could help the discussion too. ^^ Anyway. We need something to quote at least the name of Bela Lugosi. Because stuff. He invented Dracula, in a way.
Actually scratch my objection. I thought those level 1 drains were simple damages (I was in a rush, and probably should have read a little closer before commenting). It really doesn't change the build that much, so I'm fine with it.
