Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)

[spastic]

I have been playing through a Shalore Temporal Warden on Nightmare, in 1.3.0b5, I have a few thoughts:

1. It currently feels like one of the most powerful classes I've used, on par with a Shalore Doombringer I just beat Nightmare with. All of my 3 deaths have been foolish or careless on my part, and I'm on High Peak lvl 5, about to reach the wizards.

2. The graphics on all of the temporary guardians feels a little lacking. Most of the time they show up as nothing but a ring burst teleportation effect - it would be awesome if their graphic effect was a fading character sprite instead of a teleportation burst. This would have the effect of leaving a ethereal guardians on the screen instead of all of the teleportation burst effects.

3. There seems to be some optimization required for all of the summoned guardians, they seem to cause some slow down of my game, making attacks take a long time to resolve even as non-attacking things like moving and using other abilities act much quicker.

4. I wish there was a ranged melee closer - it feels lacking in a class with so much mobility and blink-striking. Adding some range to Blink Blade (maybe similar range to Braided Blade, in that it scales with talent level) would be awesome, I think, without really affecting the overall class power much. I regularly find myself with all my ranged abilities on CD and none of my melee abilities used, since it makes sense to initiate combat from range at higher difficulties.

I'm excited to see how the class develops. I haven't tried any warp mines, I did try the hounds on Normal difficulty but they seemed like they'd only get in the way at higher difficulties. Everything dies so fast anyhow, and the class already wants to unlock Stasis and Threaded Combat. I use Time Shield a lot, but maybe I'm valuing it more than I should.

[edge2054]

I gave blink blade some range a few days ago in exchange for the third set of hits. It's in the latest build that darkgod just posted.

The clones actually do appear. They're full copies of the player. I'll see if I can figure out a way to make them linger a few more frames. I'm not sure how to optimize them more. They no longer have an inventory which helps quite a bit. I'll look over the code and see if there's anything else I can do.

There's already been clears on Nightmare with Dogs/Bow. Threaded Combat is by no means required, nor is Stasis. I just cleared normal last night with Blade/Dogs and no Stasis.

Dogs helped tank buffed Argoniel (b6) while I was playtesting on Insane.

Also Shalore. Timeless is just so good.

[spastic]

Yeah, I pretty much just used Stasis for Time Shield with Contingency for most of the game, but I could have easily put Contingency to a damage shield to give me enough time to escape (or played smarter such that I never really needed it in the first place). And Threaded Combat seems to be a nice boost to damage and damage reduction, but nothing too spectacular, even with Warden's Call. The teleport active ability has been nifty a few times as an escape, the CD ability I find mostly useless, but in these cases I had another escape online I could have used, so the category unlock has probably not been worth the opportunity cost.

I do see the clones appearing, but they are so brief that they can be hard to catch. I'm running this on a decent machine (it can easily play SC2 on ultra at 1600x1080, the resolution of my monitor). I don't know how easy these things are to code, but I thought an ethereal clone sprite (maybe a half second fade in/fade out) might look cooler than the current teleport burst, which feels a bit messy and cluttered in larger melees.

I didn't realize dogs would get so tanky, that's really cool. I notice they seemed to hurt me a lot when I got stuck in an ice block.

And yes, Shalore is so phenomenally good with this class, not only Timeless but also since Haste stacks with Grace of the Eternals. By the second turn of major combats I'm up to 174% global speed and 163% attack speed, and I haven't started using Heroism yet.

[spastic]

FYI, I haven't done extensive testing, but as soon as I took off the Void Orb ring a lot of the slowness around what I assume is related to clones went away. I also have Life Drinker as my dagger, so I have two different on spell hit effects (that I really like) that might be causing some weird loops. I also have a weird bug on this save where I can no longer access my talents menu or right click on abilities in the hotkey pad along the bottom, so maybe the save got corrupted somehow.

[elboyo]

I found an amazing, but very dangerous item to use with the Threaded Combat tree.

Shantiz's Stormblade is the most amazing dagger to use with a melee TW build. Every turn, when you hit with your main weapon, you will spawn a alternate timeline warden that fires an arrow. Your dagger will then connect and immediately destroy this arrow mid-flight, dealing AoE damage and dazing.

BEWARE If you try this combo the other direction, you will fire an arrow and a warden will spawn with your dual-wield setup. When the warden hits your enemy, your arrow will explode. However, the clone is not you. These explosions will produce friendly fire and murder the crap out of you.

[Thasero]

The description for Warp Blade still mentions bonus damage that scales with your spellpower, even though that part of the talent has been removed.

There's some kind of memory leak or failed clean-up occurring when a temporal clone is made. Playing a character with Warden's Call, I've noticed that performance gradually worsens over a play session, with the most notable impact on the time required for auto-save when entering a zone - there's a long delay before the game becomes responsive, then particle effects animate at increased speed for a while to "catch up". The problem gets worse and worse over time, but exiting to the game's main menu and reloading my save restores normal performance.

Warden's Call is very strong if you focus on on-hit effects, i.e. Weapon Folding, Weapon Manifold, and equipment with the right bonuses. For example, have Icy Kill in your dual-wield offhand slot and your bow attacks will now also call a blade warden to freeze nearby enemies. An especially funny option is to take the Meteoric Crash prodigy, and then execute the Warden Orbital Bombardment by having you and your three best alternate-timeline friends attack the same target for quadruple meteors. (Watch out for the friendly fire, though.)

Damage aside, I think I don't like the way Warden's Call works as a passive; it kind of cheapens the cool factor of summoning alternate versions of yourself when you do it as easy as breathing whenever any kind of fighting happens as all. Plus, it's a bit... odd... that you can smash through eleventy-hundred timelines to pull bizarro versions of yourself out of thin air and not cause any paradox. It's a passive skill that's flashier than several prodigies.

[edge2054]

Warden's Call is a top tier talent. Unstoppable certainly could be compared to some prodigies too. Procs and flashiness aside (which is a lot of an aside sure), Warden's Call is essentially a randomized version of Corrupted Strength that deals less damage at the expense of proccing more consistently. It also gives none of the other bonuses of Corrupted Strength (i.e. off-hand weapon damage). Thematically, Warden's bleed into each other's timelines to help each other out. Their lifelines are literally braided together. We'll have some lore going into this at some point.

Anyway we're close to release and it will go live as is. Any further balance changes will have to wait until 1.31.

I did clear the clones particle table and lowered the max iterations before the blade warden will give up on spawning. Seems to have helped performance quite a bit. Hopefully that patch will make it into release.

[edge2054]

With the new optimization I managed to get halfway through High Peak before things slowed down.

The slow down was related to a death. As soon as I died I went to Eidelon plane, came back, and the game was practically unplayable.

Thasero do you play on Adventurer mode? Another guy I talked to said he started having issues after Dreamscape. I'm wondering if temporary levels like Ededlon etc. are messing with garbage collection.

[malboro_urchin]

Would it be possible for TWs to be able to insta-swap weapons again? It'd really help with controlling Thread Walk & Thread the Needle

[edge2054]

I've been considering this marlboro_urchin for similar reasons. My hold up has been I don't want to go back to the days of staff warden domination. At that point I may as well drop the dual-wield focus all together and let warden's use whatever melee they want (which may not be a bad thing really).

Anyway we're only doing bug fixes at the moment in preparation for 1.3. So either way it's going to have to wait.

[malboro_urchin]

I've been considering this marlboro_urchin for similar reasons. My hold up has been I don't want to go back to the days of staff warden domination. At that point I may as well drop the dual-wield focus all together and let warden's use whatever melee they want (which may not be a bad thing really).

Anyway we're only doing bug fixes at the moment in preparation for 1.3. So either way it's going to have to wait.

Thanks for responding! Waiting's fine, I don't want anyone to get burnt out

I think, if you're worried about staves, I'd definitely keep the dual-wield focus. In my experience, good shortstaves are hard to come by, and do little damage outside of procs due to the reasonable 80% mag mod, vs, say daggers, where a TW gets the full benefit of pumping both mag and dex.

I think the only talent that really uses dual-wielding in a unique way is the parry talent; the rest of the talents, thematically and mechanically, seem like they'd work fine with any melee weapon were it not for existing requirements. I'm not sure if Blended Threads works better with dual wielding or not though.

What I don't like is that the only offhand option for a dual wielding TW is daggers, but I think that's a different issue entirely.

[edge2054]

Yeah, I was pretty bummed too when I started finding nice whips and found I hadn't supported them. Felt like a weird exception to make though.

As to the talents yeah, they're really Dual-Wield more out of legacy. None of them call attackTalentWith individually. But there is a lot of encouragement for dual-wielding (Manifolds proc more, Blended Threads causes cooldowns faster, etc.).

So I don't know. It's probably fine. Most classes are split up this way. I'll consider putting in free swap for 1.31 though. It is kinda a pita to use shoot first so you can Thread The Needle or Thread Walk. Really breaks up the flow.

[malboro_urchin]

Sweet! I've had a few situations now where I've neglected to track what I'm currently wielding and Thread Walk with instant swap could have saved my hide.

Thread Walk, btw, is an amazing, beautifully designed skill. I love the way it helps combat flow, makes it almost like a dance. It works as an escape and as a gap closer, and I don't feel bad using it as the latter, whereas normally I'd never use such a dual-purpose skill for offense.

I'll end with a question: could you explain the following?

None of them call attackTalentWith individually

Thanks!

Edit: Confused Thread Walk and Thread the Needle, meant the former!