nsrr wrote:
Guardian Beetles have significantly less base damage than the talent claims.
Ah, that's more of a quirk of how ToME's damage calculations work I think. I think it'll only do the exact base damage when the attacker has 100 strength. I should probably make the description reflect the beetles's actual damage better but I'd need to learn more about how these things are calculated first.
I died in adventure mode and lost my beetles. They didn't die, they didn't come to Eidlon with me, they were still in my party, but they just weren't anywhere. Activating the talent did nothing, same for adding another point to the talent, same for zone change.
...Those beetles are a goddamn nightmare lmao. I spent 3 entire hours fixing a bug where they'd spawn infinitely.
The class starts with Mindstar mastery, but no mindstars in inventory or quick swap. I took the point out of dagger mastery and invested in mindstars at birth, so this was especially disappointing.
This is a pretty common complaint I've been seeing.
Swarm attacks seem like they would be very weak, but I can't see myself giving up swarm defense for it anyway.
Damage from poison stacks so they're a bit stronger than they look. I had to nerf Swarm Assault in particular quite a bit because it would just dissolve things esp. groups (might have overdone it lol). I am thinking about giving the class a bit more general survivability so they're not as dependent on Defend Command, and might increase Attack Command's damage a bit.
Parasitism looks like it could deal ludicrous damage if NPCs can use it.
Way ahead of you lol; the 3rd and 4th abilities (which are imo the biggest problem children in the tree) are currently banned on NPCs pending a significant rework based on feedback I got before release. % max life will be dead, eventually. Probably.
I spent most of my run bumping.
It's kind of supposed to be a bumpy class (as much of a cop-out as "I meant to do that haha" always is). I like complicated mechanics, but I also like how streamlined the bumpier classes like Cursed feel compared to classes that have to push buttons for even basic encounters, so I think I tried to have both here (>bump class with a talent that deals damage based on a percent of a percent of a percent). I also didn't think it really suited the class's insect theme to have really overwhelming destructive power. I might have gone too far on all of that, lol.
The choice of mindstars or daggers could be interesting, but there's not much incentive to build Dexterity, and Mindstars tend to have better egoes and procs than daggers, not to mention Leaves Tide. Nature's Equilibrium is nice, too. You also need Mindpower to land status effects, so another point for Mindstars.
This is due to an actual mistake on my part; the idea was that daggers using Dexterity would let you have more accuracy while still keeping your damage up, but I didn't realise until I was about 75% of the way in that mindstars use Willpower for accuracy thus rendering a core concept of the class moot. I might just switch it over to a pure psiblade class, as much as abandoning an idea annoys me.
The morph tree is odd. Mutually exclusive sustains are awkward. Normally global speed is one of the best things you can get, but dragon gives a pretty small amount, so the stunt resistance and armor from lady bird is probably best, especially since you have another talent to boost speed, albeit temporarily. Stun is also probably the best of the effects from Morph Strike, too. Healing reduction is situationally useful. Also, really minor, but the orientation on the Dragonfly stance effect seems upside down to me, with the tail sticking up out of my head.
Ah, the Dragonfly speed buff is low because even beyond global speed being ridiculously abusable, HM themselves have (as you pointed out) a talent that boosts combat speed, which afaik interacts multiplicatively with global speed, so I really didn't want the dragonfly boost to be too high. I myself wasn't sure about how the balance worked out for the morphs and I definitely agree with you that Ladybird is probably the "good" one and Wolf Spider probably needs to be buffed in general. I think I might make Dragonfly a bit stronger and WS a lot stronger overall (Ladybird is in a nice place in my opinion). Making them stronger will probably also make the class feel a bit less wimpy.
There are some nice ideas here, I really like the theme, and your artwork is fantastic. I hope you keep at it.
Personally, I would like to see more low level active talents, more weapon attacks, and more offensive talents in general. One idea may be to rework the morph tree into a series of attack talents that grant temporary buffs, instead of sustains. Basically, make each stance strike into an attack that grants the stance buff as a temporary effect. Or, have the sustain activation include the attack. This would also encourage swapping stances more. The cap stone could still be an attack that varies by stance in that case, in the other case it could grant an extra bonus to each of the temporary effects, perhaps.
I don't think there's a way to say this without coming off as a diva but I'm not keen on making massive conceptual changes at this point unless the limb in question is severely rotten, at least not without a lot of convincing. Sorry! I really hate just brushing off criticism esp. because I can see that you absolutely are delivering this in good faith and from a good fundamental design sense to boot (which is already more than I can even reasonably ask for from a post like this), and a lot of what you're saying is stuff that I do agree with and will probably act on, but I don't see myself massively restructuring the class, because I'm personally happy with how its basic play turned out even if a lot of things about the execution of such might need more polish.
(Unless you meant most of that as advice for any classes I make going forward, in which case most of that enormous runon sentence wasn't necessary.)