Hey hey! Fairly new modder here. Just last night I finished up my first skill, and after playtesting it a bit more this afternoon I think i'm finally ready to post it. Of course, I am far from perfect, so I encourage you to give me feedback on balance, bugs, anything. Update Notes: 0.1: First release! Skill Details: 0 - Overview My idea for this skill is an increased focus on Savvy and good compatibility for half-rogue half-mage skill setups. Virus and Format are high cost, high damage spells, and benefit from Savvy a lot to reduce their cost and increase their Haywire chance (naturally, high damage spells are devastating when they haywire). Other abilities help improve your offensive and defensive abilities to help you fight with both Melee and Spells. I feel i've hit that Half-Rogue Half-Mage feeling just right without straying too far from its Mage roots for those who prefer to play pure casters. 1 - Online Gamer You've played online games for quite some time and learned some... unique... insults. You can invoke insulting words about your enemies' moms with magical power to inflict severe emotional trauma. - Very Low Cost - Deals Minor Damage to the target - Insulted enemies have -10 & for 32 turns. - Edit: I forgot to mention this effect stacks 3 times, but as of this edit i'm strongly considering taking that away and doubling the stat debuff, so it might not last long. 2 - Virus.exe Diggle.mob has encountered a problem and needs to DIE! The target is infected with a Virus, which wreaks havoc after a short delay. - High Cost (relative to other level 2 spells, of course) - Deals High damage after a 4 turn delay. - Scales from , because a virus needs to be sneaky or else nobody will download it. 3 - Overclock Truth be told, you have no idea how overclocking works, but you feel smarter, and that's what matters. - Low Cost - Buffs you: +2 , +4 , +3 - Mana upkeep every 6 turns. Lasts until removed otherwise. 4 - RNG Cultist You have taken the oath and are a devoted follower of the Random Number God. Slaying enemies in his name will sometimes earn you his blessing. - Entirely passive. - 85% chance on kill to earn the following buff: +2 , +2 , +2 to a random* resist. - Stacks 3 times, but only lasts 12 turns, so keep killing! - *Because random resistances are not yet implemented, I am using Voltaic as a placeholder. Soon... 5 - Firewall Seriously, I can't think of any good jokes for this ability. It keeps you safe from elemental damage and spells and sometimes burns & weakens enemies who attack you. - Medium cost I think? Maybe low. Somewhere around there. - Gives: +3 , +5 . - While active, 30% chance when hit to deal damage back to your attacker, burn them, and debuff them for -6 and -3 - Mana Upkeep every 12 turns and has 30 brittleness. 6 - Format You know how formatting your hard drive uninstalls everything and brings it back to square one? Well, it works pretty good on dungeons too. - Very high cost, but with a very high savvyBonus value. - Deals very high and in a targetted, 7 square wide circle (like Infernal Torus and The Stars Aligned, but not anchored to you). Doesn't deal damage to you. - Debuffs enemies with -3 to all primary attributes for 25 turns. Doesn't really* effect you. - You are silenced and have -30 for 20 turns after casting this beast. - Strips off Firewall and Overclock. Doesn't effect any other buffs, not even RNG. - Probably overpowered as hell. - *Because of an error in my code somewhere or something, this debuff might, situationally, have a slight effect on your HP. It's complicated,** but i'm pretty sure it can't kill you or really put you in any danger. And that's it. Again, any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated. The ZIP is attached. **If you really care, here's the deal: The debuff seems to want to either effect EVERYTHING, including the player, in range of format, or not work at all. I messed with this for a good 45 minutes and couldn't get it to work properly, so I gave up and went with plan B. The debuff affects you if you're in range, but then is removed immediately by a removeBuffByName line. This works for the most part, with one catch: Because you lose 3 Burliness and 3 Caddishness, for a split second, your maximum HP will dip down by 6. So if you are missing less than 6 HP, after casting format, you will be missing 6. I have no idea how to fix this and if anyone wants to poke around at my code and find why, I would appreciate it greatly. For now, if you are near max HP and don't want to lose any, simply avoid being in Format's radius when you cast it. If you're missing at least 6 HP, it will have no effect, so cast away.
One more to implement: Divide By Zero Bug. Low cost, but 1% chance to cause 100 damage with no modifiers. The other 99% of the time it does nothing because you are not using a first generation Pentium CPU. Flavor Text: This is an improvement over my old 80486??? How exactly? Please take it if you like. Change as needed/wanted. I like the mod.
I think maybe RNG cultist procs too often, but that's just a completely knee-jerk reaction based on nothing but the overview. I'll download it and try it out.
More things should scale to . I highly, highly approve of the flavor you've given it in this mod. Someday, when I'm done cooking up ridiculous things to do with core skills, I may try and make a rogue/computer wizard and see how nasty I can get that skill.
I like it, may I suggest adding a reference to the in-game item "Cybercone", or something about cyber police? It just seems to fit the flavor of the skill tree. http://dungeonsofdredmor.wikia.com/wiki/Cybercone
If the skill has abilities that scale to anything other than magic power it suggests that is is coded and intended for use with v. 1.0.10, as that was the first version to include that functionality. Will test load this on my computer and report! EDIT: Loads fine for me. Might I suggest trying it with the beta patch.
Sorry for the late replies, i've been kinda busy today. Thank you for all of the kind feedback. I originally wanted something that procced on every kill, but then again the Random Number God never makes guarantees, so I went with a high chance. I will experiment some more and await future feedback and we'll see how this skill fares. A very good idea; I'll definitely keep it in mind and toy around with implementing it sometime. I'm sorry to hear this. I'm running on Vista 32-bit, Game Version 1.0.10 RC5, and no, I am not running the essential rebalances. I'll download the rebalances and test that now. If you don't have 1.0.10 RC5, this might be it, as the RC adds the "skillname" syntax, whereas before all mods and skills use ID Numbers. Other than that, i'm not sure, and again i'll download and give the rebalances a try. EDIT: Downloaded and installed Essence's Rebalances, booted up the game in debug, ran around for a good 10 minutes, and the skill and all of it's abilities are working as intended for me.
/sigh The beta crashes with any skills if you have Interior Dredmorating and Monstrous Menagerie loaded. Sorry again. I will find how to get those stable before I try anything else.
Update: Not really much of an update, I just realized that I packaged it wrong. The sprites, skills, and mod folder are all now directly in the .zip so you don't need to unzip it. Just a convenience thing and not really important for anyone who already has it downloaded.
If there is anything Format is, overpowered is probably very, very much not it. It could use a buff. (No, seriously. It does like a sliver of damage to most things. Perhaps make it unresistable.)
Oh, hey, look, it's this again. It's been a few months since i've checked here, tweaked the mod, or even played DoD at all. I kinda shot myself in the foot releasing this. I tried to rush it out the door and barely spent any time playtesting and balancing it. I don't like how some of the icons look, the code barely works, and I can't help but feel that the first skill is fairly useless. I'll try to work on it some more once the upcoming You Have To Name The Expansion Pack DLC comes out, hopefully sometime after that we'll see a revised version with at least slightly better art, balance, and maybe even find a cure for that Format issue. I'm sorry I let this die.
