[1.7.0] Metaclass - Mage Knight

[starxsword]

I am not sure about the other Knight types, but enemy Phoenix Knight seems to scale too strongly. This is a screenshot of an enemy Phoenix Knight boss on Nightmare mode. I won't be able to beat this thing.

PhoenixKnight.jpg (101.98 KiB) Viewed 39794 times

[Kamdiere]

Just saw the rework and thus far it's plenty of fun and definitely improves upon them. The lower sustain count is nice, mainly for dealing with Weirdling Beast.

Though I have run into a snag on it, though it could theoretically be something to do with my heap of addons; point being that Eldritch Body does not adjust stat requirements over to Magic. My guess is the shuffle with the new Flexible Combat Training lost it or stepped on it. That's all.

Edit: Further testing shows that things are gaining a Magic requirement but not losing their existing requirements.

[Erenion]

So I started (and tragically ended) a Storm Knight run.
A few things that come to mind right now:
- Farstorm's block and retaliation, maybe combined with Storm Knight's counter, can cause you to kill yourself. This skill should probably have a check to prevent that.
- Good job on the fixedart weapons, they look really cool.
- Oh god, please let me never run into an Earth Knight Searing Horror ever again.

[sepik121]

sorry if this is a bother, judging by how DarkGod mentioned that addons need to be updated or will be super broken ("Addons need updating or will explode!."), any chance to update this for 1.7?

[Phoenix1]

Indeed there is! It just may take several months with no word whatsoever until it happens. (Although I don't think the new version actually broke anything here. Could be wrong but I'm pretty sure.)

This was a pretty major update. I restructured and rebalanced a lot of stuff. The OP has been updated with the new details. Large-scale changes are summarized below, but this summary excludes a bunch of more specific changes.

--

I also added a gameplay option (that is, it's in the Gameplay tab of the Game Options menu) to disable Mage Knight classes on enemies. It defaults to disabling them, so if you don't want to face Mage Knight enemies you don't have to do anything, but if you want to (or want mage knight trees on an adventurer) you can turn them on.

Essence no longer requires passing turns to recover, and no longer weakens your talents as it gets lower. Rather, it has a fixed value of 100, talents cost generally from 15-50, and it recovers rapidly (generally from 5-15 per turn, depending on Willpower and investment in the Eldritch Vigor talent). So it works almost more like a midpoint between a normal resource and a sort of universal cooldown. I think this strikes a pretty good balance between making resource management somewhat tougher for mage knights (because if you spam even a few talents you'll probably run out) while keeping their playstyle very fast-paced (because you recover Essence quickly so running low or out is more something that restricts your options for a few turns than something that requires you to fall back and rest).

While there is still a talent that lets you pass a turn for faster recovery, it's weaker than Eldritch Guard was in a number of ways and doesn't grant a giant defense bonus (Phoenix Knights and Earth Knights also have talents that give some defensive benefits when passing a turn, to emphasize their focus on tanking over movement, and the Dancing Weapon tree has some as well, but even then they're not as big.) This stuff should make passing your turn tactically viable when you need to, but it's not a big part of the playstyle anymore, and shouldn't be as safe as it used to be. It also requires enemies in the vicinity, so you can't get out of sight and recover super-fast.

Beam talents now have cooldown 3 (actually most talents have cooldowns divisible by 3 rather than 4), which combined with the above allows somewhat more beam-spamming than they could manage in the past. Still not at the level of dedicated caster classes (especially archmages), but enough to use magic to play keep-away from powerful melee threats and wear them down over time, or deal with like high Defense enemies and such.

All mage knight talent trees default to 1.0 mastery. As a result, the great majority of things that used to be based on raw talent levels no longer are, and things like Mastery items or the Adept prodigy can be fairly useful. This also made it easier for me to make sure things had the scaling patterns I wanted. Relatedly, I removed most of the "gain this function at raw talent level X" things. Some still exist where I wanted something to require more investment to reach but it couldn't really scale, but where I could I removed them or turned them into scaling percent chances.

Fixed the issue with Strength requirements not being changed to magic (had a typo in the part of the function where the strength requirement actually gets removed, but it was correct for other abilities, which is why things like daggers and whips worked; naturally the error was in the ability that gets used for like 95% of requirements.)

The attack talents no longer have "advanced energy" effects and don't wait until talent level 3 for their special effects. In some cases where the advanced energy effects were appropriately thematic I usually shifted them into other talents somewhere or somehow.

Most of the active defense/recovery talents are simply instant use now rather than waiting until talent level 3, and affect allies within radius 5 rather than being targeted. This has little effect on gameplay aside from escort missions and such (well, it can have an effect when you're using mage knight enemies) but is nice for lore purposes.

Most mobility talents now have improved effects when triggered by Eldritch Combat since they don't do the movement stuff.

I suppose the tooltips might be...somewhat more streamlined than they used to be? A little? Maybe? Most of the talents are multi-function and that wasn't something I wanted to change, so it only goes so far. That said, I made more of an effort to figure out how various things compare to each other and set the talents to fairly specific power values, dividing what they can do up among things. So they should be better in line with each other at least, to what extent I was able to do that successfully. Quite a few raw numbers got toned down a fair bit in this version, particularly direct damage.

The artifact weapons are no longer "fused". The pairs form sets, the single ones don't but I figure more-or-less make up for it by having all the bonuses in one package.

I kinda fused the Wizard Knight and Wild Magic trees together. Wizard Knight's bonuses to spell cooldown and spell speed were reduced a bit, and it no longer gives you particularly greater "beam spam" capability, since they get enough of that to work with out of the gate.

The locked trees got shuffled around so that the class ones give more "passive" benefits (Wizard Knight and Dancing Weapon) and the generic ones give active talents (Weapon Supremacy and Tactical Strikes). I also added two new locked trees, the class tree Battle Dancer which gives "active" melee talents with some rider effects, but they can only be triggered by Eldritch Combat, and the generic tree Arcana which gives a selection of support spells (one of each for recovery, defense, mobility, and utility) that can't be triggered by Eldritch Combat, but are somewhat more Essence-efficient than similar ones from the class trees.

[Erenion]

The changes look neat, although I'll need to try them.
The new version of Knight Magery looks like it might make unarmed Mage Knight a pretty fun build, due to the number of talent procs on gloves.

[Erenion]

Update after losing one run to dark crypt-related hubris and starting another one:
- Knight Magery is definitely fun with unarmed classes.
- I like the ways to give every class an extra attack.
- Fun fact: Diving Phoenix only goes on cooldown after its attack happens. This means my current character sometimes uses Diving Phoenix to engage and instantly casts two more Diving Phoenixes at the same enemy (trying dual wielding Phoenix Knight with Battle Dancer atm.)

[Phoenix1]

Yeah all the EC-triggerable talents that make an attack can trigger themselves when used manually (and similarly, a talent that can trigger and be triggered by Knight Magery can trigger itself when used manually). It's a bit weird and I'm sure I could work out some checks to prevent it, but meh.

(Triggering Blaze of Glory off of Blaze of Glory is kinda hilarious.)

[Erenion]

Okay, important note:
If you are an Earth Knight with level 3+ Gemstone Shield and attempt to manually use a shield while not having enough essence,
it will still use the turn (but not do anything.)

Also, a Storm Knight with 2 daggers only has 110% combat speed rather than the 120% I'd expect.
(trying a meme run right now, so I will update with all the weird stuff)
Eldritch Strike does nothing if you do not have a favored energy type.
Update: Eldritch Strike will use an available Battle Dance if you don't have a favored energy type, it just won't make the initial attack.
Okay, please put a check in so that you don't wreck yourself with battle dances. I was frozen, bumped to get out of the last bit of iceblock and double Dancing Flurried myself.

[Erenion]

Final update to the run that, in hindsight, I missed out on by not naming the char "no mother, I must dance":

The basic concept was a Mage Knight with no "preferred element", using Battle Dance for damage.

The character died to the Sher'Tul High Priest due to them rolling Marauder - and fighting a 150 accuracy marauder boss as a Storm Knight is, well, bad.
On the other hand, I'm actually impressed I got this far.
The big problem with this style of play is definitely level 1-9 (I floated a point or two in spells here.)
Once you got a dance, Eldritch Strike went from useless to very decent.
The one problem here is that Eldritch Strike can trigger dances that are useless at the moment - say, you use E. Strike on an enemy 4 tiles away. In that case, triggering the second or fourth talent in the tree does nothing for you.
Ethereal Form is just good on Storm Knights (until it isn't, see - my death.)
Flexible Combat - well, when you make 14 attacks per turn with any reliability, it's too good to pass up.
None of the other locked class talent categories do anything for you, since they both require a preferred element.

[Phoenix1]

Thanks for the data! I've uploaded a patch.

Okay, important note:
If you are an Earth Knight with level 3+ Gemstone Shield and attempt to manually use a shield while not having enough essence,
it will still use the turn (but not do anything.)

...Never realized that because I habitually just drag the individual shields off my hotbar. Added a pre_use check to them that will prevent use if Essence is too low.

Also, a Storm Knight with 2 daggers only has 110% combat speed rather than the 120% I'd expect.

I had spotted this too and actually did a stealth upload correcting it earlier (also a couple that fiddled with Phoenix Wings a bit). But in any event that's fixed now.

(trying a meme run right now, so I will update with all the weird stuff)
Eldritch Strike does nothing if you do not have a favored energy type.
Update: Eldritch Strike will use an available Battle Dance if you don't have a favored energy type, it just won't make the initial attack.

Added a fallback to the Favored Energy damage type. If you don't have any of the bolt spells, it'll now default to half physical, half arcane. I also noticed that the second attacks from Flexible Weapon Training were using nil for the damage type rather than whatever damage type the initial attack used, so I changed that around. A character like this should now be able to use Eldritch Strike and other things that rely on favored energy more-or-less normally.

Okay, please put a check in so that you don't wreck yourself with battle dances. I was frozen, bumped to get out of the last bit of iceblock and double Dancing Flurried myself.

Done.

The one problem here is that Eldritch Strike can trigger dances that are useless at the moment - say, you use E. Strike on an enemy 4 tiles away. In that case, triggering the second or fourth talent in the tree does nothing for you.

Yeah Eldritch Strike's ability to trigger Eldritch Combat at range has some occasional issues. The Eldritch Combat code for aiming beams seems to be such that if you're in a position where you can shoot an enemy past a wall normally, but Eldritch Combat shoots, it'll hit the wall. I have code in there so that most of the targeted melee attack talents will work when triggered at range, but PBAoEs are still self-centered. This patch doesn't include anything to fix that, but it's something I'll try and remember to take a closer look at at some point.

[Erenion]

Okay, tried the "typeless knight" playstyle again, this time with an Earth Knight.
This character took the now-working Dancing Weapon and became disgustingly powerful.
https://te4.org/characters/199593/tome/ ... 742c7412c3

The big powerspike of this character definitely came around level 30-40, where I was able to kill High Sun Paladin Aeryn by standing next to her and holding 5. The same went for the Inner Demons debuff - turns out i can't harm my demons, but they can't do anything either.
However, the character struggled a lot with the High Priest for reasons I'll explain later.
The other incredibly strong part was the early game - turns out all non-caster enemies can't really cope with you having 45 armor with 60% hardiness at level 5.

Prodigy-wise, I found Eternal Guard to be rather nice, as it eliminated any need to gear for accuracy due to counterstrikes and helped keep block up near-permanently. It also let the "damage on block" egos on shields contribute a rather meaningful amount.
Adept was thrown in as a "I need my percentage chance skills to trigger more consistently", and it performed fairly well there. It also helped (along with my willpower gear) to supercharge the Surge mechanic from Eldritch Wardings.

Feedback on specific skills:

Earthlink is nice, but can lead to problems with map generation, such as putting hidden vault entrances into walls, leading to them being inaccessible because you dig the wall, destroying the vault, when you enter them. It also allows you to walk through a lot of stuff on the worldmap - and it turns out the mountains south of Kruk Pride are diggable

Dancing Weapon feels a bit weird right now. First of all, it spams your combat log with constant weapon swaps. Second, would this not lead to the weapon-swapping bonus from the swapping talent tree being permanently active?
In addition, the playstyle of Dancing Weapon changes severely as you level the talents in the tree:
- you start off able to just hold down the wait button and let the weapon work for you
- when you learn the defensive dance, that gets completely lost and you have to bump again
- and when you get the reactive dance, you're back to just holding wait, except it's now better defensively and worse offensively.
Also (although this is probably an Earth Knight exclusive issue), the weapon did not seem to retaliate when something else blocked the damage completely.
Oh, and please mention somewhere that the weapon will only counterattack if the enemy is in range of Weapondance.

The "On Guard" buff seemed to break sometimes, granting me 200+% damage reduction temporarily (not sure why.)

And now, Eldritch Vigor and the problem with the High Priest:
The skill is extremely nice. Between Wardings, Vigor and my high willpower, debuffs ticked down at three times the rate while holding wait.
The problem here is the healing is based on your life regeneration - if that is reduced below 0, pressing wait will drain your life.
Given that the High Priest constantly reduces your life regeneration by 50+ per turn due to high levels in the entire Dark Sustenance tree, I had to flee several times during the fight to heal back up since waiting (which was my main form of defense) was actively killing me.

Finally, thank you for adding a "untyped" preferred energy. However, this damage type has a mistake in its code - if you kill the enemy it is supposed to be projected on (such as killing it with Eldritch Strike), you'll get an error as the damage type tries to check whether it's hitting an ally, but finds nothing. (there's an "if target then" missing there)

EDIT: Okay, it seems the swapping benefits from Seamless Exchange don't work.

[Phoenix1]

Cool, new patch is up.

The other incredibly strong part was the early game - turns out all non-caster enemies can't really cope with you having 45 armor with 60% hardiness at level 5.

That's fair. I shifted some of the value from Steelskin's Armor bonus to its Life bonus, which should hopefully make them a bit easier to hurt in the early going.

Earthlink is nice, but can lead to problems with map generation, such as putting hidden vault entrances into walls, leading to them being inaccessible because you dig the wall, destroying the vault, when you enter them. It also allows you to walk through a lot of stuff on the worldmap - and it turns out the mountains south of Kruk Pride are diggable

Yeah I'm not entirely sure what's up with that. In retrospect, I went ahead and changed the burrowing to work more like the Stralite Sand Shredder, only on (if my code is correct) any diggable instead of just sandwalls, and without costing a turn to dig. That will also make sure that it can't be used for like easy zig-zag tunnels (or at least, not unless you're okay with them being three tiles wide), since it's meant to be more a convenience than something that tactically powerful.

Dancing Weapon feels a bit weird right now. First of all, it spams your combat log with constant weapon swaps. Second, would this not lead to the weapon-swapping bonus from the swapping talent tree being permanently active?
In addition, the playstyle of Dancing Weapon changes severely as you level the talents in the tree:
- you start off able to just hold down the wait button and let the weapon work for you
- when you learn the defensive dance, that gets completely lost and you have to bump again
- and when you get the reactive dance, you're back to just holding wait, except it's now better defensively and worse offensively.

Huh I had thought the swaps wouldn't go to the log, must not have been paying attention to that when I tried it out. Anyway, it occurred to me that since they can't use their dancing weapon while attacking there's no reason they can't just telekinetically (or whatever) wield their primary weapon, so I took that out.

I agree that the change in how it works gets weird, and while I don't strictly mind the wait button being a viable option for someone with dancing weapon, trivializing Aeryn does take it too far. Thinking about it some, I fiddled with the whole tree a fair bit. First talent's pretty much the same. Hasted Weapondance no longer checks to make multiple attacks; instead, it gives a chance to make a dancing weapon attack when you use a talent that costs a turn (as long as it doesn't make an attack or trigger Eldritch Combat; basically this does the inverse of Eldritch Combat, let you attack while casting). This attack itself can't trigger Eldritch Combat either, but deals more damage. Defensive Weapondance now just provides a flat miss chance, but it's a bit higher than before (err...kinda, because it turns out I put the wrong function in the cancel_damage_chance so it was actually using the higher value for that, so it's a higher chance than it was supposed to be but lower than it actually was) and it works like the Storm Knight's Lightning Dodge, so it triggers on-miss effects and protects against detrimental effects as well. Then Reactive Weapondance just has a chance to counter-attack on a miss, which is tripled for a miss caused by Defensive Weapondance (so that it still has a modest chance to trigger for people who aren't stacking Defense, but if you are high Defense you'll be able to get more counter-attacks in).

The dancing weapon no longer has a defensive buff when passing a turn, so it should be a smoother progression and it should keep passing turns from getting too strong by stacking Earth or Phoenix Knight bonuses with Dancing Weapon bonuses with Eldritch Vigor bonuses. Hopefully.

Also (although this is probably an Earth Knight exclusive issue), the weapon did not seem to retaliate when something else blocked the damage completely.

Yeah that makes sense. If the damage got eaten before it reached the counter check it probably shouldn't run. In any event, no longer an issue since it's miss-based.

Oh, and please mention somewhere that the weapon will only counterattack if the enemy is in range of Weapondance.

I did actually have it mentioning the counter was against an opponent in range, but I only had it in one place instead of both so it might not have been obvious. Should be moreso now.

The "On Guard" buff seemed to break sometimes, granting me 200+% damage reduction temporarily (not sure why.)

You know I thought I saw some weirdness there with a Sea Knight but I couldn't see any issue in the code and couldn't duplicate it reliably. I'll keep an eye out for it.

And now, Eldritch Vigor and the problem with the High Priest:
The skill is extremely nice. Between Wardings, Vigor and my high willpower, debuffs ticked down at three times the rate while holding wait.
The problem here is the healing is based on your life regeneration - if that is reduced below 0, pressing wait will drain your life.
Given that the High Priest constantly reduces your life regeneration by 50+ per turn due to high levels in the entire Dark Sustenance tree, I had to flee several times during the fight to heal back up since waiting (which was my main form of defense) was actively killing me.

Added a check so the heal will only trigger if above 0.

Finally, thank you for adding a "untyped" preferred energy. However, this damage type has a mistake in its code - if you kill the enemy it is supposed to be projected on (such as killing it with Eldritch Strike), you'll get an error as the damage type tries to check whether it's hitting an ally, but finds nothing. (there's an "if target then" missing there)

Whoops! That's fixed now.

EDIT: Okay, it seems the swapping benefits from Seamless Exchange don't work.

Yeah I had a check in there to prevent that.

[Erenion]

So I devmoded up an Earth Knight just to see how strong the defenses are now and to test if robes are as ridiculous as they seem from my Mana Knight run.

Well.

Edit: This is with Defensive Weapondance triggering, just to get a feeling for how much damage Atamathon does. He does around 300 to my shield if it does not trigger.

Also, On Guard is definitely broken somewhere.


But yes, robes are brokenly strong.
T5 robes are 15% all resist.
Flexible Resistance Training is 18% with Adept.
Flexible Armor Training is 12% without shield and 15% with.
That's 48% resistance to all. All the time. Without any gear sacrifices other than wearing a t5 robe and a shield (read: none at all.)
If you're an Earth Knight, that basically means you have close to 100% physical resistance all the time.
If an enemy does not have respen, they can't do anything.
Add 32% further damage reduction from Geoshield while waiting and 18% chance to outright ignore damage from Defensive Weapondance...

Well. It leads to me being able to hold 5 next to Atamathon. On Insane. I held that button down for 100+ rounds. I did not take any noticeable damage.
EDIT: this char can tank 4 atamathons at the same time.
Also, this is happening and I have no idea what this is.

[Phoenix1]

I've been thinking about changing some of the resist alls to different percent damage reducers or something. Like, I got a Sea Knight basically to capped resist all with a couple pieces of resistance-boosting gear, which was probably too strong generally but then got crushed by enemies with good res pen, so shifting some of it to other methods would diminish the returns some since they'd reduce sequentially, but offer more of a defense against res pen. So I'll go ahead and do that.

I suspect but I'm not sure that the On Guard bug might be causing at least some and maybe most of the "tank four Atamathons" issue, so I'll prioritize fixing that (or changing it to something else if I can't find the problem). Those giant "prevented" numbers are from that, although since it looks like the prevention total was inflated beyond 100% that would be a multiple of the actual amount.

Hrm...those Negated numbers would have been from Steelskin. Assuming maxed Steelskin + Adept + kinda midline Con I'd expect about 12% negation from Steelskin. Assuming 54% hardiness since robes+shield I'd expect that to go down to like 7%. The low bits would have been straight ignoring low instances of damage, so if we just use the 46 + 37 we're talking 83 damage, divide by .07 is 1,242. On Guard then should have taken off an additional 24%, so it looks like you should have been taking like 944 there. I'm not sure this estimate is accurate; assuming you were at or near full life and your life is probably somewhere in 1,000-1,200ish range I'd have expected to see a larger amount of delayed damage there. Assuming something like a 66% max delay, and reducing it to maybe 75% normal due to damage to life comparison with no reduction for life to max comparison, the delay should have been about half the initial damage, but since the delay takes damage out before the negate that should have meant the delay should have been about equal to that 1,242, whereas instead we're seeing 324. I expect either your Hardiness, Constitution, or both are higher than I was estimating; with maxed Hardiness and like 100 Con Steelskin would go up to 15%, which would mean 553 base damage pre-negation and 357 final damage, which assuming around 40% was delayed would square with the delay numbers fairly well. Probably the true number is somewhere between those, so I'd expect you should have been taking somewhere between a few and several hundred damage there, if On Guard was working properly. At the low end that's still awfully tanky considering Atomathon, at the high end it's nothing special, but I expect it would be closer to the low end. I think I'll take the traditional resist cap bonus out of Earthen Body on the basis of it being physical damage, just to be safe.