Gladiator v 1.4.5

[HousePet]

Timed effects and sustains that are still active won't get updated by a patch.

[nsrr]

v 1.2.0

Re-tuned several talents.

Smash:
Instead of knocking back and dazing the target, Smash will now stun the primary target and and knock back and daze nearby (radius 2, or 3 with a greatmaul) enemies.
Knock back distance and stun/daze duration increase with talent level and/or when using a greatmaul.
When wearing a shield you will still do a shield attack and set up a free block, as before.
When wielding two maces you will attack first with your main hand and /twice/ with your offhand.

Hardy:
Hardy will now drain 1 stamina each time it procs, but only reduces damage that is greater than 10% of your maximum life. The reduction value now scales to the damage of your equipped mace(s).

Cleaving Blows:
Cleaving Blows will now drain 1 stamina per target hit by the cleave and will not proc if there are no enemies adjacent to your primary target.

Dexterous Strikes:
Dexterous Strikes no longer grants passive crit chance and accuracy while sustained, only the quick strike proc chance.

Tactical Strike:
Tactical Strikes (effect) will now increase physical power as well as attack speed, and the attack speed was reduced.
Tactical Cover (effect) will now increase armor hardiness as well as grant flat damage reduction, and the flat reduction has been reduced.

Arms Expertise:
At raw talent level five you will now only have a chance to perform a shield bash if you are wearing a shield, instead of a guaranteed bash. The damage of the shield attack has also been reduced, however you will set up a free block whenever it procs.

Fixed a couple of descriptions that had the wrong values.

Normalized all weapon attacks (except Tactical Strike) to use weapon speed.

And probably something else I forgot, knowing me

[nsrr]

v 1.3.0

Re-tuned Arms Handling tree:
Deft Actions now has it's cool down reduced to 10 at raw talent level 4, and to 9 at raw level 5 or above.

Battle Fervor will now have an initial duration of 8 turns and stack up to 5 times. Regeneration values have been reduced.

Honed Reflexes will now grant evasion for 4 turns, and, starting at talent level 3, critical chance for 8 turns.
As with Battle Fervor, critical chance will now stack up to 5 times and the values have been reduced.

Combat Vigor will now heal 33% of your missing life when you use Deft Actions starting at raw talent level 3; this will increase to 50% at raw talent level 5.

Other Changes:

Hardy will now trigger on damage >= 5% of you max life, rather than 10% . Reduction value increased slightly.

Battlescarred will now properly update for changes to Constitution.

--

Unless I notice any serious bugs, I think I'm done tweaking this for a while. I've gotten it tuned to the point where I feel that it is now reasonably powerful without being overpowered. My biggest concern is still the regeneration on Battle Fervor, in particular the life regen. With a few pieces of healing mod gear it can get quite high early on, even without a lot of Con, but I think it will fall off at higher levels. Only more testing will tell, and I can only play so much ToME (due to circumstances beyond my control ).

[nsrr]

Unless I notice any serious bugs...

Why do I say things like this?

Sigh...

v 1.3.1
Fixed a bug with the updated Battlescarred. (that caused it throw a whole bunch of errors, yay! )

[Frumple]

So, uh. Combat Vigor is bloody insane. If... if you can/know how, I'd probably recommend making it so it isn't effected by healmod -- right now, only a few of the better healmod items and it's basically "Heal all my lost health every time I trigger Deft Actions." Which is kinda' constantly. Like, the 20-30+ regen on a max stack battle fervor is more or less nothing compared to that.

Alternately, maybe put the heal trigger (at least) on a 15-20 turn cooldown. Right now, you're probably triggering deft actions every 4-6 turns (and eventually less, because you know I'm going Eye of the Tiger with this nonsense ), which is... yeah. Full heal, every 4-6 turns, if you've got >=200% healmod (which... isn't difficult to get), I do believe. I love it, because it's completely farcical to experience, but it's probably a bit much

Also, possibly consider removing the trigger on slow parts of... well, everything. On the one hand, it synergizes very well with whips and whatnot. On the other hand, slow on melee hit from a rare or randart means you trivially have at least a slow on everything, always, which means setting up those extra effects is entirely passive with zero talent investment, which... seems like it's not entirely intended?

Anyway, enjoying so far. Running ogre, because of course I'm running ogre when one-hand weapons don't do anything special on their own. Playing very passively, for what it's worth -- I've actually set both deft actions and tactical strike to auto-use when adjacent, and To the Throat is just about the only non-movement button I'm actually pressing outside of inscriptions and an item or two. I do expect that to change somewhat once I finish actually getting all the passive/sustain talents I want, but right now (Level 17, just about to see if I can step on the weirdling beast) it's just kind of a faceroll. Damage is pretty low because I'm trying to go exotics and haven't found a warrior escort, but basically nothing (Have ate one death to playing hilariously lazily, but still) can kill me so it hardly matters, heh.

[nsrr]

So, uh. Combat Vigor is bloody insane.

Yeah, it's a bit over the top. Also, thanks for all the feedback!

Truth be told, I was not considering heal mod when I created the talent and was working under the assumption that the healing would more or less mitigate itself since it is based on lost life. Not sure how I managed to over look that when I have another class that plays with heal mod heavily...

Anyway, this talent is going to be reworked. I'm also re-tuning the whole tree (again). The level 3 and above effects of Battle Fervor and Honed Reflexes are going to be merged in from talent level 1, and Combat Vigor is changing almost entirely. It will now generate a stacking 'buff', much like Fervor and Honed. The buff does nothing itself, but the talent can be activated to remove detrimental effects, and restore life and stamina, all based on the number of stacks. Activating it will remove all stacks of Vigor, Honed and Fervor. Since these buffs naturally fall off due to the diminishing duration renewal, this will give you something to watch as the duration starts to fall off. Optimally, aiming to pop it after you hit max stacks but before the buffs fall off. With Eye of the Tiger you could potentially keep the buffs up forever, as you pointed out, so if you go that build you will have to weigh the benefit of the debuff cleanse, heal, and stam renewal against having to rebuild your stacks.

You make a good point about Slows, too. I feel like the number of subtypes is a little... awkward? ... anyway. Listing all five over and over feels a bit off, for some reason. In order to keep the interaction with Whips, I will be changing the on-hit Whip effect to be a 'wound' subtype effect that will slow the actor's attack and movement speeds (this will also cause these slows to stack with global slow, which has a cap). Similarly, the Trident effect will also be changed to a 'wound' that sets 'nevermove' on the actor (pinning it). Slow and Pin will be removed from the debuffCount function and all effects will trigger on Stuns, Sunders and Wounds only.

I wasn't planning to rush this, but a bug that I thought I had squashed has come back to bite me. On the bright side, it is definitely, actually dead this time.
A few updates back I posted that I had fixed a bug with a callback that was causing crits to produce zero damage... this was not the case. The callback had nothing to do with it; Frenzy was actually at fault. It was removing crit mult when the buff was deactivated... but, due to a typo, it was not granting crit mult in the first place. This would slowly bring your crit mult down any time the buff was disabled, and eventually it would go negative... so whenever you crit you were dealing negative damage to the enemy. The game just ignores all damage less than zero, so this wasn't causing any game crashing errors or anything, and it took the buff being disabled four or five times before crit mult actually went negative and made the problem more obvious.

If all goes smoothly, I should have an update ready in the next day or two, if not sooner.

[nsrr]

If all goes smoothly, I should have an update ready in the next day or two, if not sooner.

That went more smoothly than I had expected. I wasn't sure how the new Combat Vigor was going to work out, but it didn't really hit any snags and I think I have it tuned pretty well.

So...

--
v 1.4.0

Cleave now drains 0.5 stamina per target hit, reduced from 1 per target.

Fixed a bug with Frenzy that could cause you to permanently lose critical multiplier (and never gain any from the sustain).

Whips and Tridents now apply new 'wound' subtype effects that slow and pin, respectively.

All talents that triggered on Pins, Slows, Stuns, Sunders and Wounds will now trigger only on Stuns, Sunders and Wounds.
This does not affect the number of effects you have available for stacking from Gladiator talents, but it does reduce the number of effects you could potentially stack from weapon ego procs.

Slightly reduced the regeneration and healing/stam restoration of Battle Fervor and Frenzy, respectively.

Re-tuned Arms Handling (again):

Battle Fervor: cooldown reduction chance has been merged into the ability starting at level 1 and the maximum chance has been increased.

Honed Reflexes: Crit chance has been merged into the ability starting at level 1 and the maximum Evasion chance has been increased.

Combat Vigor:
This has been reworked into an activated ability/stacking buff. It can be used instantly, has a 12 turn cooldown, and has no resource cost.

You will gain one stack of Combat Vigor each time you use Deft Actions and it can stack up to 5 times. The duration will be renewed to 8, less 1 per stack.
When you activate the talent it will remove one detrimental effect, per stack, up to (raw talent level) effects.
It will also restore 0.5% of your maximum life and stamina, per raw talent level, per stack. (12.5% at level 5 with 5 stacks)
When you activate this talent it will remove all stacks of Combat Vigor, Honed Reflexes and Battle Fervor.

Compared to Second Wind, which can restore 55% of your maximum stamina every 50 turns, Combat Vigor can restore (at best) 50% of your maximum stamina over 48 turns. Considering it can be used more often and has other benefits, but also has the added cost of removing your stacked up buffs, and is not always at full power, this seemed liked a reasonable balance point. For healing, with a maxed out heal mod (250%), you could restore (at best) ~31% of your max life every 12 turns. The cooldown could be reduced by Eye of the Tiger pretty effectively, considering you don't have a lot of Techniques in your arsenal, potentially making this still quite powerful. However, considering it would take pretty serious gear commitment and a prodigy point (not to mention a fair amount of class point investment), that doesn't seem unreasonable. This is, after all, the class's core defensive tree.

Also, because I'm an idiot...

v 1.4.1

Combat Vigor, Battle Fervor and Honed Reflexes will now display their number of stacks on the buff icon, as well as the duration.

Now that a crippling bug has been removed and the over-all healing power of the class has been reduced, I think it's approaching a pretty well-polished, balanced point.

I would love to hear more feedback from anyone who has tried it out!

I am considering creating new Technique trees to replace Two-Hand Assualt, Shield Defense and Dual Weapon Training. None of these talent trees are really ideal (for Gladiator or for their original classes, for that matter). The Dual tree would basically include aspects of both vanilla Dual trees (off hand mastery, flurry, something?, and the attack speed buff). The Two Hand tree will include talents from the various two-hand trees (likely stunning blow, sunder armor, an improved version of sunder arms, and the bleeding version of death dance). The Shield tree will be a reworked version of Shield Defense (change the debuff on Shield Wall, likely to 5% global speed, make the second talent not terrible, somehow, replace shield expertise with an activated defensive talent that also passively grants points in shield expertise, tweak last stand). If anyone has suggestions for these, I'd be glad to hear them.

[nsrr]

All right, first Gladiator I rolled after uploading 1.4.1... made it all the way

Minimus Maximus the Kruk Cornac Gladiator

I spend a lot more time fiddling around with my addons then I do (non-test) playing ToME, so this was actually my first Embers win... and my first Nightmare win... and my first Adventure win. Also my first win with one of my own classes, and the only Gladiator win (so far).

It's great to know that the class is viable and I'd love to hear more of player's experience with it. I didn't encounter any bugs on this run and the class felt like it had pretty well achieved the balance point I was going for. If anyone comes across any bugs, please let me know, and, of course, I'm always interested in suggestions for the class.

Also, while I had considered reworking some of the vanilla talents that the class uses, I don't think I'm going to spend the effort on that at this point. I have some other things I'd like to work on, and the class is viable and has a variety of builds as is, so I will leave it, at least for the time being.

[astralInferno]

Tridents and whips have fairly odd interactions with Telekinesis. They grant lash/thrust just fine, but you only get the Exotic techniques for the one you wield normally. This might be a good thing, though, otherwise each talent is two talents for free.

[nsrr]

Tridents and whips have fairly odd interactions with Telekinesis. They grant lash/thrust just fine, but you only get the Exotic techniques for the one you wield normally. This might be a good thing, though, otherwise each talent is two talents for free.

I hadn't really considered TK wielding, but it is intended for the tree to be a sort of 2-for-1 anyway. Orges should be able to take advantage of this, at least. And, of course, you can easily wield them in off sets and swap back and forth. The tree is high level, takes a cat point to unlock, and requires both Strength and Dexterity for unlocks. Combined with the fact that the talents are only useful with a limited weapon set, I think this is reasonable.

That being said... I might look into it, but trying to optimize talents for Adventurer compatibility isn't really reasonable. It's odd that Lash and Thrust are not affected the same as the other talents, as they are all learned and unlearned using the same callbacks. However... The checks I use for weapon type requirements for talent use are not set up to check the TK slot, anyhow, so it would take a lot of reworking for you to even be able to use those talents with the TK weapon. I'm fairly certain... ish... that even if TK wielding a Trident grants you Thrust, you wouldn't be able to actually use the talent anyway, as there is no Trident in your mainhand.

[astralInferno]

I was able to use Thrust! It's possible that it used my mainhand (whip) weapon, but it definitely did damage in a beam.

[nsrr]

I was able to use Thrust! It's possible that it used my mainhand (whip) weapon, but it definitely did damage in a beam.

That's.... odd. I can't really explain it. The first two lines of the 'action' code for Thrust are:

Code: Select all

local weapon = self:getInven("MAINHAND")[1]
if not weapon or not weapon.subtype == "trident" then return nil end

So... oh, wait, I see what's going on now. That code would work fine normally, as you would have to have a Trident in your mainhand to have Thrust anyhow... but that 'or' in their means it only cares if your have a weapon in your mainhand /or/ the weapon in your mainhand is a Trident. Which is not what I actually want to check, obviously. I copied most of the code for Thrust from Lash, which I wrote before coding the 'doWieldCheck' function I use for all the other weapon attacks. Should easily be able to replace the broken check with the 'doWieldCheck' function to take care of this. I'll take a look into it later. This might also be related to not gaining the other talents with a TK weapon.

[echo42]

The talent level of the whip skills granted by the exotic tree appear to increase by one every time you switch weapons if you dual-wield whips. Thankfully since said skills don't appear to scale with talent level it's largely a cosmetic issue, but still worth mentioning.

[nsrr]

The talent level of the whip skills granted by the exotic tree appear to increase by one every time you switch weapons if you dual-wield whips. Thankfully since said skills don't appear to scale with talent level it's largely a cosmetic issue, but still worth mentioning.

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it! You are correct; Lash does not scale with talent level. I would like to to fix the issue for cosmetic reasons, but I haven't had the kind of time to work on mods that I used to. I have a few other changes in mind for the class and if I find the time to work on those I will try to work out a fix for this, too.

That being said, if any serious bugs crop up or any ToME updates break this mod (or any of my others) I will do my absolute best to make time to fix it, so don't hesitate to let me know!

[Chronosplit]

This happened when I killed a rare with Gladiator talents: