Why is "This translation is all wrong" considered too powerful and will be nerfed in 1.04?

@DavidB111, thanks again, man. I think between you and me the most optimal solution has been voiced enough that I don't need to repeat it again.

 

Have it cap the amount of positives it can create, also add in a chance for it to break the weapon.

 

If the ability to remove negative effects is so vital then surely it shouldn't be restricted to a single skill path?

You're arguing that a broken effect (being able to keep rerolling every artifact until perfect) shouldn't be removed because the same skill also has an entirely different function (removing negative curses)!

I agree that an ability to remove negative stats is a good thing to have in the game but there any many other mechanics that could be introduced to do that were the rerolling to be fixed.

 

@DavidB1111 I think you are sincerely trying to offer useful solutions. However, have you considered that the next patch is supposed to introduce the idea that other items beside your weapon can become corrupted? Your suggestion means someone with Archaeology could stand in front of a Magicky Golem and put all their items at the maximum level of enchantment.

@Clocknova The point of doing weird game-breaking things is to understand how the system mechanics work. Sometimes the result is worthless, but sometimes the result is discovering a bug, and sometimes the result is just a powerful combination. Are you suggesting that when someone discovers a bug that trivializes the difficulty of the game then they should be congratulated and allowed to trivialize the difficulty of the game? What is the point of achievements, then?

 

Look guys, this isn't a difficult concept. We're saying that the rerolling an item with a negative enhancement or corruption should have a chance to REMOVE that enhancement, not turn it into a bonus. That is all. I don't care how it gets done, but the player should have a path that lets them do it.

I do not, however, think that every skill combo should get to do it. I like that it's a bonus for archaeologists.

 

These should be the goals:
1) allow people to reroll as needed
2) limit the # of times you can reroll an item

cooldown = 80 + (#_times_that_item_rerolled * 40)

so 1st time you use it on an item, it's 80 seconds cooldown. Next time, if you use it on the same item, cooldown jumps to 120, then 160, and so on.

But new equipment can still have the 80 second cooldown. This way, you limit the times you can reroll an item.

 

Imo removing negative enchantments should be a skill gained from lvl 5 crafting skills.With alchemy you can dip it into acid every x turns to remove 1 negavite enchantment while you will also get a debuff decreasing your resistances(or magic power) to everything by your lvl for 30 turns.So if you are lvl 20 you get -20 resistance for 30 turns.

For smithing you smack the curse out of your equipment but it drains your melee power by a percentage for 30 turns
For tinkering you blast the curse away but it will reduce your sight to 1(or 2 it will let your see only the next tile.

Rerolling the same item should have a limit.I mean how many times can you retranslate the same text into something else ehh?

 

@Incendax Good points.
As I said, it's fine if what happens if we put a cap on how many positive things can spawn, and how high they can go. Surely, you can agree with me that capping how many points in an attack bonus is a good thing, right?
Yes, if someone really wanted to waste a lot of time, they could curse and reroll their stuff until they get like 2 to all resistances. But that won't make anyone immune to anything, nor will it break the game, and it will take them several thousand turns to do so.

Also, it doesn't really make sense for the corruption to attack anything but weapons, but if they do add it to damage other equipment, it will force people to always take archeology to reroll the damaged stuff.
PLus, as I've said several times, fixing the weapon/armor that is damaged by magic attacks makes sense in a roguelike.
Unless they want to add disenchantment resistance.

 

I don't think we should get rid of the infinite rerolls, though obviously bugs should be fixed (and I would personally count turning corruption penalties into bonuses a bug).

However, the discussion about whether or not high level powers themselves are overpowered always seems silly to me. With four or five points in Archaeology, you're friggin Indiana Jones himself - you damn well better be able to make artifacts your bitch.

In my opinion, high level abilities <i>should</i> be ridiculous and overpowered - you've mastered the art, <b>of course</b> you should be able to pull stupid awesome stunts like counter-attack against a ranged attack or cast spells for free or gib with AOE damage on a critical hit or knock enemies through walls or do a melee attack at range or stab a dude so hard his whole monster class feels it. It's your <i>reward</i> for making it to that level and mastering the skill! Don't knock down Archaeology, buff everything else! (though I still think ot should have both anvil recharge and artifact reroll but that's a different matter)

Of course, even then the enemies still need to be a challenge, and not just have more HP and do more damage - the stuff <i>they</i> can do should be weird and dangerous too. Tossing you up (or down!) a dlevel, slowing you so you attack second instead of first, randomly teleporting you or shoving you around, blowing down walls, exploding, eating other mobs to get more powerful - there's all sorts of things.

People just get too invested in the apparent power level of the game, and say "all things should be this powerful, but no more". Screw that! The sky's the limit, and it's all good as long as the results are fun and awesome.

 

@DavidB1111 Ultimately, it is up to the developers to decide if turning negative enchantments into positive enchantments is a bug or a feature. I personally would prefer that it only rerolled the negative enchantment to some other negative enchantment but I will be content either way.

It does make sense to have items other than your weapon corrupted. If I can punch you in the face, or the chest, or the leg, then so can a Magicky Golem and subsequently those locations can become corrupted.

 

@Incendax It's a bug. From the blog "This Translation is All Wrong!, in addition to having bugs, is too powerful. It needs to be reined in." I think that's why there's a thread on this in the first place.

Also Corruption is also intended to affect armor too. "Corruption should affect armour as well as weapons." There are plenty of proactive ways to avoid corruption. These enemies have unique abilities/attacks and should be feared. You shouldn't be able to invest 2 points into a skill tree and make them obsolete.

Right now this skill is better than seeing a krong anvil. That's how good it is. No matter what skill set I go for, I always make room archeology. It's the single one-shoe-fits-all skill tree. Well that and fungal arts.

 

To those who thought to change the skill such that (1) each artifact can only be rerolled a limited number of times; (2) there is a chance the artifact would be destroyed: Either way won't change anything at all. The option to just try again and again from an earlier save point is always there. Changing the skill in such a way only makes it more tedious to reroll. In my opinion, only by changing the fundamental mechanic that negatives would stay as negatives could the skill be toned down in a way that's not easily circumvented.

And to those arguing the "if you don't like something, just don't do it yourself, but leave it there for the rest of us" sort of thing, that logic just won't hold either. In this case, currently Archaeology (even if only for the ability to turn negatives to positives, in my opinion) is just too good that it's a must-have, instead of an option. The game is forcing us to play this way because Archaeology is just that good. Choosing to not abuse Archaeology would be like having a Beowulf-ish self-imposed mentalblock that to prove something to yourself, you choose to fight Lord Dredmor with a crappy 1-damage starter sword instead of of some monstrous 10-star weapon. The game shouldn't be easy, nor should it passive-aggressively make us pretend like the obviously easy path isn't there. Please just balance the game.

 

If you remove the infinite rerolls, or make each extra one take so long it isn't worth the time, then a large part of the lure of the archaeology skill tree is destroyed. One reroll just isn't worth enough for that skill point.

The same goes for eliminating the ability to remove negatives.

If they do nerf it that hard, I hope it's possible to mod it back in.

 

1) There is no reason for TTIAW to be powerful. The advantage of the Archaeology skill tree is that it has no cost to any of its abilities other than skill points, gives you a great hat just for selecting it, and works well with any type of character. Nerfing TTIAW to have the intended effect will not ruin the allure of Archaeology.

2) If there was going to be a way to remove negative enchantments, it certainly would not be done with this ability, both from a thematic and balance perspective. Think about it, all you're doing is re-translating texts. It would make more sense to remove negatives via magic items or crafting.

 

You know, I love the Fedora but it always seems like it will pick the Astrology Hat or the Golemancy Hat over the Fedora. Does anyone have any idea why certain skills have priority?

 

Honestly, without the ability to reshuffle my items to my hearts content I doubt I'd ever grab archeology. Anvils are too dodgy a lot of the time for me to care about a second try(especially at 4 skill points), I've never even had the fedora, and the experience gain for burning an artifact is nice, but hardly worth spending skill points on.

If the bugs were stripped out so it consistently kept the same "total" it'd be fine. If it slowly whittled away negatives(say, a 10 * number of negative enchantments % chance of removing one "negative" slot) it'd be nice. Not turning them into positives, just helping mitigate heavy cursing or corruption is what I think it should shoot for.

Actually, that might be alright if either a new skill was added, or the anvil of krong thing was replaced(somewhere, someone mentioned it'd be a good addition to the smith tree?) with a skill specifically designed to "clean" corrupted artifacts, that'd work to. Translation could be the capstone, the cleaning skill could replace translation.

 

To Incendax: Just make sure that when you choose your skills, you click on Archaeology after Astrology or Fleshsmithing.

 

Of course TTIAW should be powerful. Are you seriously trying to apply logic to this game? Really? If that's the case, then why would retranslating text on an item change what it was already doing. We're not looking for hard reason here, simply for fun. And it's fun just the way it is. All that needs to be done is fix the damage stacking bug so that rerolling weapons works just like rerolling anything else.

 

@Countmore That does not work for me. I just triple checked to be absolutely certain I was not imagining things but it will always give me the Astrology Hat first, then the Golemancy Hat (only if I do not pick Astrology as well), then the Fedora (only if I do not pick Astrology or Golemancy), then the Hachimaki (only if I do not pick Astrology, Golemancy, or Archaeology).

 

@clocknova
You seem to have misunderstood. The "damage stacking bug" is partly bug (positives never get turned to negatives again), partly just how Archaeology works currently (infinite rerolls, can turn negatives to positives). With or without the bug part, given enough patience, you can just keep rerolling until eventually you get a gamebreaking weapon; the bug just makes it happen faster. So it's not enough to just fix the bug, but how Archaeology works fundamentally needs to be addressed.

You also mentioned fun. That's what we're all trying to get. For me, the game is no fun having a single skill to completely shut down cold (or even take advantage of) all those supposedly scary corruption-causing monsters/traps. So yeah, I don't want the Translation skill to be that powerful, because it's not fun that way. I think several people here would agree.