astralInferno's Celestial Oddities (Class Pack)

[astralInferno]

I cant actually load the site to check past versions; but are you using the latest version of the addon, 1.1.4? It's quite possible that I messed something up, but that snippet of code doesn't quite make sense with what I have in front of me.

(From the Trench Strider Thread, on the topic of their frailty)

You're absolutely right. While I need to solve it, let me explain why the problem arose:
I play on normal difficulty (no shame for this) and usually exploration (that's kinda shameful tho). Often with bonus stuff too (haha who wants a challenge anyway amirite) so dying is disappointing but. Not, yknow. Fatal.
More importantly, when I made this addon, I was new to the game, I didn't really understand it at all. I'm marginally better now - I try to put some CC and defences on my classes, don't always succeed. I wanted to make the trench strider a glass cannon who used hit and run tactics.
Course, 'glass cannon' doesn't really work in ToME, and if it did, it wouldnt work for melee characters.

Now. As a glass cannon, what I ought to do is give them some form of defence bonuses; to gel with those it can already grab from mobility...
Maybe if I grant them Voidwalker (from Nullpack) and then give them heals/shields on teleport...

[Kamdiere]

Ah, I just checked and I am one version behind. My mistake. Anywho.



On the subject of Trench Strider...
Ah, I see. Well as long as you add something to help them survive I'll be happy but I do hope you come up with something more thematic than teleportation buffs. Though those tend not to last long enough to save you for long anyway and this class has a few 'slow death' tools so they'd need staying power or those skills are a waste of time.

As an aside, I've been playing them on normal adventure.

Had a couple thoughts while I was mulling it over. Could chew on the idea of a a generic tree focused on ice for disabling enemies and giving yourself armor/iceblock-esque damage shields and more ways to get wet status on more targets. Trench Strider is pretty good in 1 on 1 and can pretty much shut down a target if they don't die first but they lack the ability to disable groups so giving their tide skills the ability to wet and (at higher ranks) wider radius would be very useful. Could also consider making the tide skills instant cast and if you want to make them real easy to use you can make them unable to be used while the other is active so you can set them both to autcast while enemies are visible and in melee and it will naturally swap between flowing in and out and give your 'presence' a smoother and less clunky feel. Anywho, again, up to you whatever you make, I just wanna give you any ideas I can to help the process along.

[astralInferno]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'more thematic'. Trench strider is meant to be leaping all over the place with super high mobility and knockback; getting bonuses for doing so seems the perfect place to put in some defences. Straight up 'giving them armor' is really really really not something I'd like to do. (Even if nothing else, it won't save you from the enemies in tome that are actually scary, which bypass armor)

Tide skills should already wet, though I like the autocasting idea. I'll see if there's anything I can do about that.

[Kanos]

Hey, I just finished a Nightmare run with Radiant and wanted to give some feedback.

https://te4.org/characters/7814/tome/19 ... d55a20684c

I guess I'll go tree by tree for the modified/new trees. My category point choices were Inscription -> Reactor -> Irradiate -> Rot -> Blight.

Class Trees:

Celestial/Volatility: Solar Flares is a really blatant 1/5, especially since it loses value as the game goes on. Sudden Purge is a great mainline nuke/resource spender. Pulsing Aura is very powerful lategame. Chain Reaction goes from useless to amazing in the endgame.

Celestial/Sunlight: Searing Light and Sun Flare are as normal. Solar Beam is completely useless because spending two turns at once for a mediocre nuke is a proposition that can potentially get you killed. Stream of Life would be very powerful except I didn't use it much due to a bug(outlined later).

Celestial/Irradiate: Very solid locked tree. Irradiate would be way better if there were more consistent ways to inflict illumination. Radiant Worship is the class's best nuke, with superior range and massive damage across multiple types. Nuclear Fusion is a useful button to cover the class's relatively bad AoE, but the range/radius/damage boost being flat means that more than 1 point is unnecessary since almost any time you cast it you'll be hitting a lot of the AoE and getting a giant boost anyway. Purge Weakness is a fairly standard Wildfire.

Corruption/Sickly Radiance: Sickening Light is a really great passive. Awful Radiance is an okay filler nuke. Terrible Glory's debuff is a little too narrow and weak to be useful and I didn't use Dying Star.

Celestial/Sunbeams: Heart and soul of the class. Blind the Sinful is your main generator and very solid. Light of Orion is one of the most fun spells I've ever used and is - fantastic, being a solid nuke, an escape tool, or a gap closer all in one; it's hugely versatile and all around great. Danmaku is solid raw damage and doubles as janky AoE. Second Sun is the engine that makes the class function and works very well at putting out pretty huge damage.

Generic Trees:

Corruption/Sickness: Wow, what a great generic spread. Bloated Tolerance makes Constitution a much more attractive stat. Sickness Within, Sickness Without isn't so hot, but they can't all be winners. Unnatural Vitality is probably too good; a wonder skill that provides great damage and negative death. Manic Flurry is a fantastic 3/5 and gives the class fantastic action economy.

Celestial/Reactor: Well, the first skill here is overpowered survivability; a fairly strong, auto-regenerating shield that works completely passively gives the class a huge amount of durability on top of its massive HP pool, and that doesn't even get into the buttons it gives you. Unfortunately, the rest of the skills simply don't function well due to their trigger requirement. Investing incredibly valuable generic points on a generic-starved class for admittedly powerful abilities that will cease functioning the moment you take a hit is a bad idea all around, and against any reasonably dangerous opposition the other Reactor skills are going to deactivate almost immediately and never be up for the duration of the fight.

Impressions:

The class is a little rocky at the start until you hit Second Sun and then it pretty much becomes smooth sailing, especially as your incredibly powerful locked trees come online. Very rarely did I feel under serious threat once I got off the ground, and my only death was through the sheer hubris of fighting an entire Rak'shor entrance lobby with multiple bosses at once in a straight fight in an open room; easily preventable. My Elendar/Argoniel fight went on for ages but I simply did not care about anything because I was too durable. If the class has weaknesses, it's that it's terribly vulnerable to antimagic resource drains and so much of its damage being backloaded into Second Sun means it's very bad at dealing damage against moving enemies, as they'll move out of the path of Second Sun after the initial beam hit.

There are two major design flaws with the class. First, absolutely no active form of Vim regeneration(Worm Walk doesn't count) is terrible and it means that many of the vim skills are absolutely unusable, even when you're not fighting antimagic users. The only vim skill I used for the majority of the game was Radiant Worship. Later I picked up Poison Storm and even those two spells were a serious stretch on natural vim regen until I found some vim on crit items. The class desperately needs either a Drain-like spell or some other way to actively generate vim in combat to make their vim-based options usable. The second design flaw is the Reactor tree. The first skill is probably too strong for a five point investment, but the other skills are nearly useless in the mid to lategame; my late game shield was ~500 with a regen of something like 80 per turn, which generally meant that one or two good hits would be enough to drop me below even the 25% threshold for maxing out the secondary skills.

Bugs:

One major bug I noticed involved Critical Mass and Stream of Life; when I hit 90%+ crit lategame, sustaining Stream of Life and firing a spell at an enemy would freak out and proc Critical Mass like a billion times at once, instantly eradicating any enemy in the radius. For this reason I was forced to not utilize Stream of Life at all. A minor bug is Danmaku spewing out lua errors if you try to cancel casting it after firing one or two of the beams but not the third. I also had a weird bug occur in the Slime Tunnels where I eradicated one of the bosses down there with a 30k crit but I can't figure out what caused it.

Overall, it's a very fun class that I really enjoyed playing.

[Talow]

I think the infinite loop from Stream of Life + Chain Reaction is from the fact that the healing is critting.

Far as I can work out, without code diving, its ( on crit: Is stacks of chain reaction 5 or more? yes? take away all stacks and deal light and blight damage to all enemies in radius X) but the light damage interrupts the blight damage to proc healing from stream of life, which crits, with starts the chain over. Repeat till whatever is around is dead.

[Amakthel]

That sounds about right with the crit cycle--it only gets worse with second sun, because it seems like the dark echo is critting as well??? Testing on the training dummies just gives me a stack overflow, preceded by a minimum of 1 000 000 damage in a single turn.

[astralInferno]

GAH.

1.1.5
-Dropped a way, way overdue tactical nuke on the possibility of Chain Reaction going infinite.
-Improved Irradiate talent info. >.<

Thank you for the stream of life catch, I wouldn't have thought of that interaction.

[astralInferno]

Thank you so much for the detailed comments, Kanos!

I see your point on solar flares. Not sure if there's anything I can do to make higher levels more attractive, so I may have to just leave that as a 1/5 talent.

I think Solar Beam is being underestimated! To elaborate, you mentioned how great Radiant Worship's damage is; Solarbeam does more damage in its one beam than radiant glory does /if they stand in the blight for its entire duration/. plus, it then makes a second sun echo for its super high base damage, though it loses the burn on the echo same way Radiant Worship loses the creep. I'm willing to buff this, since I like the pokemon reference a lot, but I do think people are passing over it without checking just how much damage it does. For reference, the light damage is slightly higher than an archmage's Flame spell. And then the burning is the same amount again! That said, I guess it gets exponentially more risky to skip a turn as you go up in difficulties...

Stream of Life bug was just fixed. ><

Irradiate... this is ENTIRELY my bad. It doesn't proc off of 'Illumination' - is that even a debuff? - it procs off of Luminescence...

This is also what makes Terrible Glory useful. So, that talent looking bad is my fault entirely.

You didn't comment either way on dying Star, but I'll note that it's considered a disease, and thus procs their disease effects, as well as spreading with epidemic.

I'm glad you liked Light of Orion! Trivia: I named it after Project Orion - an actual, real life plan to travel through space by dropping nuclear bombs behind the spaceship and riding the blast wave!

Bloated Tolerance - and the whole tree (and the whole class and their bonuses from Con) - was designed before the Constitution buffs! In light of them, their bonuses could probably use some mild nerfs.

I was worried Reactor would have those problems. I can nerf the numbers on the first talent, but making the others work somewhat could be trickier. I'll think on it.

They were definitely meant to be really tough! Sickness and Light made that a given. As mentioned the Con buffs has magnified that still further, so I'll need to tune it down at least slightly.

The idea with Vim was /meant/ to be that you kill things with celestial spells to get the vim to kill stuff. But... well. You dont build willpower so you dont actually get a reasonable amount of vim back. I'll definitely do something about this when I can update.

As mentioned, I'm stuck with Reactor...

I have fixed the stream of life/chain reaction interaction, and hopefully removed the possibility of chain reaction proccing while mid proc at all.

I also grabbed someone more competent and fixed Danmaku. It also does all the targeting at once now, which feels much smoother, so send your thanks to hachem muche!

So. As you may have gathered, I dont really play on the tougher difficulties. And by that I mean 'at all'. How do you feel it was balance wise? Did it stand out as stronger than the top of the top contenders, like archmage/paradox mage/arcane blade? I probably dont want it to be standing toe to toe with them; I want it to be somewhere between Sun Paladin and Corruptor, ideally. (And not just cause of its metaclasses...)
You mentioned Pulsing Aura being very strong. Is it too strong? Should I nerf it? is Awful Radiance as a filler spell in need of buffs, or is it okay that every class has some of them? (Awful Radiance still triggers sickening light, iirc, double disease.) Can Unnatural Vitality have its numbers nerfed, or is having both effects on one talent just a no-go?
Basically, you've given opinions on what's strong and weak; what's so strong it needs to be nerfed and what's weak but could be buffed to be better?

More important than interrogating you for balance questions, though; I'm really glad you enjoyed it! I rly dont care if it's so broken the entire game was trivial, really, compared to caring about whether it's fun.
I hope you enjoy the other classes just as much!
(...and give just as many comments! )

[Kanos]

The biggest problem with Solar Beam isn't the damage output(which is actually extremely good for its cooldown and the fact that it's a resource generator), it's the fact that it takes two turns to fire off and there's no way to interrupt spending both turns in a row. If you could spend a turn charging it and then choose to release it it would be safer, but as it is using it is kind of dangerous; if I'm in a tense fight against a dangerous randboss, depending on what class he is giving him two turns in a row can be dicey.

Bloated Tolerance is probably a little strong now that Con is less of a trap stat, though I really liked feeling gigantic and beefy. Too many caster classes are reliant on shield mitigation of various types(Aegis or Bone Shield) so being a nerd with an actual deep HP pool felt good. Maybe drop the bonuses to 0.5 HP scaling per rank instead of 1, but in return buff the blight resist a little(the class does a ton of accidental self-blight damage by blundering into its own Second Sun beams if you're not careful!).

I think the answer to Reactor is nerf the shield power on the initial talent a bit, but make it so points invested in the further talents in the tree power up the shield in various ways. Just spitballing, but maybe Exclusion Zone could improve the shield maximum, Nuclear Drive could improve the charge rate, and Critical Mass could provide damage reduction or something along those lines. I think Reactor is only too powerful if you get the full benefit of the shield for five generics and done; if getting worth out of the shield required a serious investment in the tree, it would be fine and could even be buffed. To deal with the problem of the abilities not being worth investment because the shields crumble too fast, I could see two ways to go about it; you could introduce scaling benefits(so instead of simply turning off past a certain level, the effects merely weaken as the shield does) or you could introduce a mindslayer shield spike-like effect where you can temporarily "spike" the effect to guarantee that it will work at full power for x amount of turns before being disabled for a while. So to try to make that clearer, say you had a "shield spike" button attached to Critical Mass. You could hit that button and guarantee the full effect of Critical Mass even if the barrier dropped for, say, 8 turns, but after the buff wears off you lose the benefits for a few turns as compensation. That would make those talents worthwhile in difficult fights where you're most likely to lose the shield immediately. I'm not a coder so I don't know how hard this would be to code, I'm just tossing ideas at the wall based on my experience.

There definitely needs to be some sort of active way to regenerate Vim along the lines of Drain. Passive Vim regeneration can mostly keep up with normal demands, but the massive buff to antimagic in 1.5 means that running into an enemy with Mana Clash basically destroys your Vim supply and it will take tons of dead enemies to get back to a functional level, which means that investing in Vim talents is a dicey proposition because they could simply not be available to you when you need them. I actually really wanted to do a disease-based build but a couple of abortive runs showed me that the class simply didn't have the vim generation to sustain spamming virulent disease. I think a nice stopgap solution would be to make Awful Radiance cost positive energy(15? 20?) but generate a substantial amount of Vim, on par with Drain from Corruptor/Reaver; this would preserve the intended theme you want of spending positive energy to generate vim while adding a large amount of reliability to the vim side of the class.

As far as the general power level of the class, it honestly felt like it was in a fairly good spot. It was incredibly durable, but certainly not moreso than a competently played Paradox Mage or Archmage, and it had clear weaknesses in its poor mobility and bad damage against mobile targets that made up for its impressive damage output for a caster. I don't think Pulsing Aura is overpowered so much as it's an extremely powerful durability talent; if anything, it's weaker than Damage Smearing from Paradox Mage because you get a similar level of durability from it but you trade Damage Smearing's consistency for randomness. It's just a good talent that fits the theme of the class well. Similarly, Unnatural Vitality is extremely good but I don't think it's too good; it's simply one of those must have talents that encourages deep investment, which I think is good. I'd rather a class have a ton of good options that require deep investment to force you to make a choice on what you're investing into than just a few really good options and a bunch of one point wonders.

[Erenion]

So... this addon might have created the most fun character I've ever played.

https://te4.org/characters/199593/tome/ ... 09c6288f60

Behold Razediance, Herald of Explosions!

Basically, the principle this character is based on is to proc Chain Reaction as often as possible.
At the moment I'm about 140 levels deep into the ID and... it's ridiculous how much damage Chain Reaction can deal at this point.
Seriously, try a Chain Reaction based adventurer.

As a side note, this is probably my favorite class-adding addon. Thanks for making it!

[Erenion]

While looking for any weird build-around interactions, I found a piece of code that is very exploitable.

Basically, Replenishing Tides process Ancestral Life. With high mind power and accuracy, this leads to infinite melee attacks against adjacent targets in one single turn.

[minmay]

introducing the ☛ TURBO MOONCUCKER ☚

step 0 be a stargazer

step 1 locate chump


step 2 cast mirror wall on chump


step 3 stand in mirror wall


step 4 cast lunar orb upwards (for best results use redux, spatial prism, solar wind, and timeless too)


step 5




(blame SuperHC for making me do this)

[astralInferno]

The biggest problem with Solar Beam isn't the damage output(which is actually extremely good for its cooldown and the fact that it's a resource generator), it's the fact that it takes two turns to fire off and there's no way to interrupt spending both turns in a row. If you could spend a turn charging it and then choose to release it it would be safer, but as it is using it is kind of dangerous; if I'm in a tense fight against a dangerous randboss, depending on what class he is giving him two turns in a row can be dicey.

Bloated Tolerance is probably a little strong now that Con is less of a trap stat, though I really liked feeling gigantic and beefy. Too many caster classes are reliant on shield mitigation of various types(Aegis or Bone Shield) so being a nerd with an actual deep HP pool felt good. Maybe drop the bonuses to 0.5 HP scaling per rank instead of 1, but in return buff the blight resist a little(the class does a ton of accidental self-blight damage by blundering into its own Second Sun beams if you're not careful!).

I think the answer to Reactor is nerf the shield power on the initial talent a bit, but make it so points invested in the further talents in the tree power up the shield in various ways. Just spitballing, but maybe Exclusion Zone could improve the shield maximum, Nuclear Drive could improve the charge rate, and Critical Mass could provide damage reduction or something along those lines. I think Reactor is only too powerful if you get the full benefit of the shield for five generics and done; if getting worth out of the shield required a serious investment in the tree, it would be fine and could even be buffed. To deal with the problem of the abilities not being worth investment because the shields crumble too fast, I could see two ways to go about it; you could introduce scaling benefits(so instead of simply turning off past a certain level, the effects merely weaken as the shield does) or you could introduce a mindslayer shield spike-like effect where you can temporarily "spike" the effect to guarantee that it will work at full power for x amount of turns before being disabled for a while. So to try to make that clearer, say you had a "shield spike" button attached to Critical Mass. You could hit that button and guarantee the full effect of Critical Mass even if the barrier dropped for, say, 8 turns, but after the buff wears off you lose the benefits for a few turns as compensation. That would make those talents worthwhile in difficult fights where you're most likely to lose the shield immediately. I'm not a coder so I don't know how hard this would be to code, I'm just tossing ideas at the wall based on my experience.

There definitely needs to be some sort of active way to regenerate Vim along the lines of Drain. Passive Vim regeneration can mostly keep up with normal demands, but the massive buff to antimagic in 1.5 means that running into an enemy with Mana Clash basically destroys your Vim supply and it will take tons of dead enemies to get back to a functional level, which means that investing in Vim talents is a dicey proposition because they could simply not be available to you when you need them. I actually really wanted to do a disease-based build but a couple of abortive runs showed me that the class simply didn't have the vim generation to sustain spamming virulent disease. I think a nice stopgap solution would be to make Awful Radiance cost positive energy(15? 20?) but generate a substantial amount of Vim, on par with Drain from Corruptor/Reaver; this would preserve the intended theme you want of spending positive energy to generate vim while adding a large amount of reliability to the vim side of the class.

As far as the general power level of the class, it honestly felt like it was in a fairly good spot. It was incredibly durable, but certainly not moreso than a competently played Paradox Mage or Archmage, and it had clear weaknesses in its poor mobility and bad damage against mobile targets that made up for its impressive damage output for a caster. I don't think Pulsing Aura is overpowered so much as it's an extremely powerful durability talent; if anything, it's weaker than Damage Smearing from Paradox Mage because you get a similar level of durability from it but you trade Damage Smearing's consistency for randomness. It's just a good talent that fits the theme of the class well. Similarly, Unnatural Vitality is extremely good but I don't think it's too good; it's simply one of those must have talents that encourages deep investment, which I think is good. I'd rather a class have a ton of good options that require deep investment to force you to make a choice on what you're investing into than just a few really good options and a bunch of one point wonders.

I took this on board when you typed it, but I haven't been up to coding since then. Rest assured that I'll be working based on this feedback when I do.

So... this addon might have created the most fun character I've ever played.

https://te4.org/characters/199593/tome/ ... 09c6288f60

Behold Razediance, Herald of Explosions!

Basically, the principle this character is based on is to proc Chain Reaction as often as possible.
At the moment I'm about 140 levels deep into the ID and... it's ridiculous how much damage Chain Reaction can deal at this point.
Seriously, try a Chain Reaction based adventurer.

As a side note, this is probably my favorite class-adding addon. Thanks for making it!

Glorious. Adventurer builds are my lifeblood. xD

Thanks for the compliment and for having fun!

While looking for any weird build-around interactions, I found a piece of code that is very exploitable.

Basically, Replenishing Tides process Ancestral Life. With high mind power and accuracy, this leads to infinite melee attacks against adjacent targets in one single turn.

....it SHOULDN'T proc ancestral life. O_o
For like, two different reasons.

Ancestral Life is procced by regeneration effects. Replenishing Tides is a flat heal.
And even if you take the 'flat heals give regen effects' talent... Replenishing Tides disables on_heal effects like that before it applies.
If this has happened, I really don't know how.

[Calodine]

Just two semi minor things I found after brief testing with the primal chosen - Having combat training as a locked tree makes hitting things a reaaal pain, since you don't have accuracy, and the class has too many good locked trees for you to get everything you want as it is

Also as near as I can tell putting points in The stars align doesn't actually do anything before rank 4, where you get the extra spin stack AND extra negative energy regen.

I did start a lunar primal chosen, took one look at the locked categories (And how amazing the final lunar talent would be with this) and sobbed profusely as I rerolled into a cornac for those sweet hymns

[astralInferno]

Well by default they start with a point of combat accuracy, but if you have that turned off you are a bit out of luck... I'll consider giving them combat training unlocked if/when I ever get back to coding. Either way, it's only 50 gold away.

The Stars Align actually gives, per stack, 0.5+(talent level/5) negative regen. So it goes up by 0.2 every level, without accounting for mastery. I will admit though; this is way too low. I need to add something else to actually make these worth leveling.

Lunars were specifically designed to synergise with them, yes, but cat points are so good. xD