I was playing around with buffcounting and it somehow turned into this mod. I apologize in advance for the puns. The main goals of soul magic are: Create a magic tree that was usable by heavily armored warriors Introduce an interesting mechanic, which requires careful decision making Give players a new way to kill themselves The central mechanics of soul magic are: Upon killing a monster, you gain a soul. All your abilities scale off of the number of souls you have gathered Whenever you use an ability of any sort you take damage if you have too many souls. Beyond that, I would recommend trying the mod and trying to figure things out on your own. I'm really terrible at explaining things. . Less important mechanics stuff: Spoiler: Soul Burn and Souled Out Upon casting a spell, your stolen souls are iterated through. Each soul deals ((N x.5)-4) ((N x.25)-2) where N is the number of souls iterated through so far. All effects which remove souls also give the debuff Souled Out, which reduces your effective number of souls by four for all positive effects. Killing monsters changes two stacks of Souled Out to Souled Out (fading), which will go away after 5 turns of not using soul magic. I am considering altering the Souled Out mechanic, as it is extremely difficult to maintain a manageable number of souls without crippling your soul magic capabilities. Skills: (I will be using to represent number of souls, as typing that out would get tiresome.) Spoiler: Level 0: Shoo Souls Stealing souls is pretty much strictly detrimental until you get better at it, so you've learned how to get rid of excess souls Damages all monsters within the 8 surrounding squares for (( x.8)) + (( x.8)) Also includes an attack in whatever direction you are facing Removes a Soul, granting Souled Out Not sure about the damage- this could be a huge nuke, but the Souled Out stacks hopefully limit repeatability. Spoiler: Level 1: Soul Foot Kick your enemies with souls. Don't ask how. Costs (4-( x.05)) min 2 Damages target for (2 + ( x.1)) + (( x.3) -1), Also includes an attack in the direction of your target. I am fairly happy with this balance wise- it doesn't make a huge impact but remains quite useful. Spoiler: Level 2: Soular Flare It's a pun on solar flare. That's the joke. Good night folks. Costs (12-( x.2)) min 4 Damages all monsters within 3 radius for (( x.3)) + (( x.3)) Damages in a cross centered around each monster within 3 radius for (( x.15)) + (( x.15)), Not sure about the cost of this. Not sure about damage- worth noting that using this with a surfeit of souls will probably leave you dead or close. Spoiler: Level 3: Soul Survivor Better withstand those revolting souls. Costs (4-savvy: x.05)) Grants 4 2, Mana Upkeep 1/turn Stackable I am worried about this skill. I never really found occasion to use it, but it seems overpowered to me nonetheless. Spoiler: Level 4: Spirit Bomb Spend six turns yelling and making your hair stand on end before nuking your enemies. Leaves you with one health and no mana. Pretty much just kills everything in the vast area, and leaves you with one hitpoint and no mana. I can give details if it seems important, but it's a needlessly complicated ability and would be a pain to type up. The risk of using this is great enough that I am willing to call kills everything balanced. This has some graphical issues with the explosions not being centered properly- I deemed this not worth fixing. I am strongly considering switching this with Soul Ace; this skill may be a more appropriate capstone. Spoiler: Level 5: Soul Ace Your complete mastery of soul magic allows you to renounce it. Kinda makes you wonder why anyone would pick up soul magic in the first place. Clears your souls, converting them to Souled Out debuffs. Finally a simple one. Please tell me why my mod is terrible- the one I posted on steam got basically no feedback and I'm still unhappy with it.
The damage for casting spells seems pretty high, and it exhibits quadratic growth while damage only has linear growth which should inhibit high levels of damage without a build focusing on it. For examples 10 souls is 2.25 damage, 15 21 damage, 20 58.5 damage, 25 114.75 damage and it just keeps going. I'm going to go try it though to see how much use I can get out of it so I'll come back when I've got some actual playtime with it but it looks like it will become a mana hog with minimal returns later in. EDIT: The soul survivor skill isn't showing up in the skills page for me so I can't access anything past the first 2 levels.
Well I am a chump. I forgot to revert some test changes. Soul Survivor is a level 3 skill again. In regards to the damage, the quadratic growth was intentional. I want overshooting on souls too badly to really hurt. However, I do acknowledge that late game scaling is a huge problem, and I am willing to completely rework things to fix that. I just have no idea where to start with doing so.
For one, you might want to add a chance, regardless of how small, for every skill to randomly remove souls based on how many of those you have. The same way the damage scales, every soul could roll for a soul removal when everything triggered - even if the chance was just a few percent, it means you would not be able to go above a certain number of souls if you only used this skill tree and nothing else. Don't get me wrong, I know there already is the "souled out" effect. But the point is, with just one single-target spell of non-terrible power it's possible to get rid of it fairly easily, and there's no risk of permanent loss of souls from it. Which means that right now it doesn't matter for this mod whether you use your other skill trees well throughout most of the game for as long as you spend a short time ridding yourself of "souled out" debuffs before major fights.
That is a really good idea. I will implement this and make the soul burn damage linear. (And probably rebalance things while I'm at it)
Unfortunately I got bored of trying to balance this horrendous pile of nonsense. I'm going to stick this on the backburner for now, possibly forever. If anyone wants to try to make this playable, go right ahead. However, since I didn't comment well at all I would not waste your time.
