Prodigy Balance Discussion

[minmay]

Late night idea for Through the Crowd: have it increase max summons. Maybe then it would at least not be complete garbage for summoner and oozemancer (not that they really need the help...).

[SageAcrin]

Well, that wouldn't hurt, but yeah.

As far as simple fixes go? Another one could be to have it pass a flat rate portion of all your stats onto all summons you make, on top of their own. Heck, it could reasonably pass your entire stat value to them, honestly.

It's not incredibly simple/incredibly powerful, but it does something then. It's also vaguely a pun. (You are exercising all of your power through your summons, as well as their own, so you're literally working through the crowd...)

Alternatively, you could swipe the idea for Bloated Oozes; Have the skill transfer some of all the damage you take to your summons. Or boost their global speed.

[HousePet]

Added my thoughts to the googley grid.

[grmblfzzz]

Through the Crowd is the biggest stand-out problematical one that he hasn't touched in the SVN (Although I still think that lots of the suggestions are good for the borderline ones in the doc!). I'm like the concept of the prodigy, and I think there's stuff you could do without a total rework.

Make it so when you spend you 1/10 of a turn swapping with a summon you get some buff? Evasion seems standard for pet-like things.

Or, when you swap the summon gets a free attack immediately?

[Parcae2]

An active ability that makes your next summon ability take no time to use?

[HousePet]

Activate to instantly swap place with target friendly creature. (or maybe enemy as well)

[srulz]

So, yesterday I've gotten into a little bit of friendly argument with DG and others on the huge nerfing of Mental Tyranny in SVN:

http://git.develz.org/?p=tome.git;a=com ... b9916f97f4 (100% -> 33% conversion to mind damage)

And today he ask me to "make my case in the forums ". So here we go!

Firstly, Mental Tyranny is not something everybody rushes to get, even though "on paper" it made your life a whole lot easier (Stack 1 damage type only! Free damage! Free resist penetration!). Feel free to browse the character vaults to confirm. Now why is this? Well, there's the simple fact that all mind damage have a mental save. When you see "resists your mind attack!", that means your mind damage fails its save, and the actual damage got halved.

So, due to this, Mental Tyranny is pretty much limited to only primarily Mindpower-boosting classes. And, there is a specific segment/niche for this: the Hate/Psi/Equilibrium-based classes. So about 7 classes, if we skip Summoner (no transfer to pets whatsoever): Cursed, Doomed, Stone Warden, Wyrmic, Oozemancer, Mindslayer, Solipsist.

Now please bear in mind that almost all of them don't have "natural" mind damage at all. So this prodigy, in its old 100% form, enables some kind of build with focus on mind damage building only, without having to worry about all their various "natural" kinds of damage. And most of the "natural" damage boosting/penetrating skills will then be able to be skipped, saving points in exchange for a much higher dependence on equipment support.

However, when only 33% of damage is converted, what would happen? The ones with the "natural" mind damage will be severely affected, since only their mind damage will be fully boosted, while other damage only get 33% effect. However! It will now be completely useless for the others (the non-mind damage ones), since only 33% of all their damage is boosted by damage/resist pen, while they still need to find ways to boost their own "natural" damage.

TLDR: Current Mental Tyranny nerf will cause the prodigy to be suitable to even smaller niche than before, very much unlike Temporal Form which everybody could use. And do use.

Suggestion: if you reduce severely the penetration/damage, the original purpose of this prodigy will be relatively untouched.

Thanks for reading!

[SageAcrin]

The question, then, is if Mental Tyranny should be a "convert damage" Prodigy with a low emphasis on damage boosting, or a "damage boost" prodigy with a low emphasis on conversion, as I see it.

Some reasons I can see to keep it the 33% way;

A: It nerfs Antimagic play in a way AM hasn't really been nerfed. It leaves them with no full conversion option; Temporal Form is_spell. This is how AM should be balanced, not by buffing mages, in my opinion; By limiting AM options. That's a good thing, to me.

B: Many of dedicated mental pseudo-mages aren't terribly bothered. Mindslayer is the main loser(as they have no Mind damage innately, instead focusing on physical). Doomed and Solipsist are generally fine(as they had innate Mind damage to start with.). Wyrmic arguably got an unreasonable overboost from it(as the heavy spread of the elements is a designed downside with a talent dedicated to mitigate it). And Oozemancer has the two on-hit resistance reducer skills that Mental Tyranny never could leverage off of.

C: The mind damage resist point was meant to be part of what it hinges on. It doesn't work, though; Mindpower has generally gone up quite notably since I made the talent. (Psiblades becoming universal, costless and having a major impact on Mindpower is the main culprit here, and Superpower changes will only make it less minor for fighter/mind types next version.) In practice, it's not a notable downside anymore, unless you're trying to take it on a Bulwark or something.

Having said that; Yes, it does make it worse, you're right. It's certainly still great for two classes, though, and still usable for Wyrmic(due to their huge element spread). And many other classes can use it due to incidental boosts(a decent amount of good mindpower gear raises Minddamage%). Mostly, it hits Mindslayer the hardest(who were de facto fairly close to mono-element).

I think it's okay, personally. It's certainly more interesting than it being overly central.

As a final note, there's a big reason directly comparing to Temporal Form falls flat; One is a sustain, the other is an active. Yes, Temporal Form is good at what it does, but it still only works for 10 turns out of 30, and you need to make those turns count and not screw up and use it at the wrong points. You can't always just pull off and wait for your CDs to reset; Some enemies heal literally thousands of damage in that time, while other times you can't rely on not landing in a combat situation after an escape.

[Zonk]

Make it so when you spend you 1/10 of a turn swapping with a summon you get some buff? Evasion seems standard for pet-like things.

Or, when you swap the summon gets a free attack immediately?

Save/resistance/evasion bonus based on how many adjacent allies you have?

[srulz]

The question, then, is if Mental Tyranny should be a "convert damage" Prodigy with a low emphasis on damage boosting, or a "damage boost" prodigy with a low emphasis on conversion, as I see it.

Indeed. Do bear in mind that there are tons of "damage boost" prodigies in-game anyway, most of them passive and unfun. So, is this going to be yet another boring "damage boost"? "Transcend the physical!"..right.

A: It nerfs Antimagic play in a way AM hasn't really been nerfed. It leaves them with no full conversion option; Temporal Form is_spell. This is how AM should be balanced, not by buffing mages, in my opinion; By limiting AM options. That's a good thing, to me.

AM don't need nerfs. Being locked out of arcane artifacts/spells is the biggest downside ever. But this is not the correct discussion for that, so I'm just going to leave it there.

B: Many of dedicated mental pseudo-mages aren't terribly bothered. Mindslayer is the main loser(as they have no Mind damage innately, instead focusing on physical). Doomed and Solipsist are generally fine(as they had innate Mind damage to start with.). Wyrmic arguably got an unreasonable overboost from it(as the heavy spread of the elements is a designed downside with a talent dedicated to mitigate it). And Oozemancer has the two on-hit resistance reducer skills that Mental Tyranny never could leverage off of.

Now, since we are pretty much nerfing this skill, let's just focus on 1 character which is claimed to have "unreasonable overboost" before: Wyrmics.

I've gone through the vault for all Wyrmic level 50 winners since 1.0.0. There are a total of 87 winners in all. Out of that huge number, 2 uses Mental Tyranny: Lizar'du, and Smumaris. 2/87 = 2.2%. Less than 3% of Wyrmic winners had ever taken Mental Tyranny. I don't think that's a sign of an overpowered skill, is it?

C: The mind damage resist point was meant to be part of what it hinges on. It doesn't work, though; Mindpower has generally gone up quite notably since I made the talent. (Psiblades becoming universal, costless and having a major impact on Mindpower is the main culprit here, and Superpower changes will only make it less minor for fighter/mind types next version.) In practice, it's not a notable downside anymore, unless you're trying to take it on a Bulwark or something.

Psiblades is 750, not something you can scrounge up easily in the beginning. Also, it's very weak in the midgame, and only get boosted by the lategame artifacts. In practice, you cannot just depend on the Psiblades to pull you through.

Having said that; Yes, it does make it worse, you're right. It's certainly still great for two classes, though, and still usable for Wyrmic(due to their huge element spread). And many other classes can use it due to incidental boosts(a decent amount of good mindpower gear raises Minddamage%). Mostly, it hits Mindslayer the hardest(who were de facto fairly close to mono-element).

I don't think there are any classes that will use it now due to "incidental boosts". As with all the other Power, Mindpower is something you build up for. Getting 40% extra damage on just 33% of all your damage, which may get resisted, and skips all your other innate damage-boosting skills, is just..sad.

As a final note, there's a big reason directly comparing to Temporal Form falls flat; One is a sustain, the other is an active. Yes, Temporal Form is good at what it does, but it still only works for 10 turns out of 30, and you need to make those turns count and not screw up and use it at the wrong points. You can't always just pull off and wait for your CDs to reset; Some enemies heal literally thousands of damage in that time, while other times you can't rely on not landing in a combat situation after an escape.

10 turns is more than enough to finish 90% of the battles in-game, and really boost your damage in the other 10%. And the effects of Temporal Form is tremendous - it beats Mental Tyranny hands down in pretty much every way possible, except the duration. I know you are highly experienced in this game, so I don't think I need to list out the many pros of Temporal Form compared to Mental Tyranny.

Do tell if you want me to do so, though.

[Stition]

Just the fact that people are so defensive over mental tyranny is a sign of a problem with the talent.
IMO, both temporal form and mental tyranny greatly simplify gearing and ability choices for a player. Like was said before, if a class is useless without it, that's more of a problem with the class.

Mind damage is also the easiest source to stack damage on. I currently use temporal form b/c it's better, but use mind damage to get the initial boost (this is on a paradox mage btw). With the current itemization, mental tyranny needs this change (temporal form needs a similar change).

I'm also of the opinion that wyrmics are one of the weaker classes, and require difficult itemization and ability decisions until they get either temp form or mental tyranny, then they become beasts. One of the weaknesses of many of the ranged classes is damage coming from multiple types, which I think is a good thing.

The number of wins for a class is also likely directly related to popularity rather than how good they are. Shadowblades probably have few wins but I think they're the most powerful class in the game.

[grmblfzzz]

First order: Gentle nudge to keep looking at Through the Crowd. So close to fixing all of the problem prodigies, might as well try for 100%

Secondly, about Mental Tyrany(MT): I've always viewed it previously as the somewhat lazy and/or AM version of Temporal Form(TF). With the changes, it'll still fill that role but just in a weaker version. Mind you, overall these changes are for the best as both MT and TF definitely needed nerfs.

Sage/Srulz/Stition all bring up valid points related to this, but the bottom line for how it'll work out will boil down to the question of: Is MT now too badly dominated by TF? That MT is the only available one to AM is a balance point, if you think AM needs balancing downwards (I'm actually of the opposite opinion, but this goes into difficulty scaling and utility, and not really the place). I suspect I'll still be going TF on a majority of characters, both due to the 100% conversion and secondary benefits (Stun immunity!), and MT will be a much more specialty case. I kind of feel that TF was already stronger, and the nerf to MT was actually larger.

Anyway, I'm quite impatient and curious to test out some of these changes for science, so am going to try to go ahead and compile a SVN build for some beta testing as the patch is still probably going to be a little while (DG says there's still a bunch of stuff he wants to do). When/If I get it working properly I'll post it in the Nightly SVN build thread so others can mess around with it to maybe get better numbers/more objective data.

[Kaja Rainbow]

I see a few different options:

• Turn Mental Tyranny into an active. True, that'd kinda clone Temporal Form, but it seems like it's difficult to balance this kind of always-on damage conversion and damage boost.
• Dump the damage boost and resistance penetration and simply make it a 100% conversion talent. This makes it more a matter of alternative options as you might decide to drop the sustain to kill something with high Mind resistance (though those seem very rare).
• Dump the current effects and have it add bonus mind damage to all attacks. Though getting the scaling right would be the tricky part.
• Something else I haven't thought of.

[srulz]

Just the fact that people are so defensive over mental tyranny is a sign of a problem with the talent.
IMO, both temporal form and mental tyranny greatly simplify gearing and ability choices for a player. Like was said before, if a class is useless without it, that's more of a problem with the class.

I am not "people", Stition nobody but me is defending the skill. I just thought that the nerf to Mental Tyranny among all the other prodigy buffs is a little bit over-the-top.

Mind damage is also the easiest source to stack damage on. I currently use temporal form b/c it's better, but use mind damage to get the initial boost (this is on a paradox mage btw). With the current itemization, mental tyranny needs this change (temporal form needs a similar change).

That..is different. You don't actually use those mind damage, so you don't have to care about itemizing for Mindpower.

I'm also of the opinion that wyrmics are one of the weaker classes, and require difficult itemization and ability decisions until they get either temp form or mental tyranny, then they become beasts. One of the weaknesses of many of the ranged classes is damage coming from multiple types, which I think is a good thing.

Like my data shown before, only 3% of all Wyrmics use Mental Tyranny. That's not the sign of a game-changing skill.

The number of wins for a class is also likely directly related to popularity rather than how good they are. Shadowblades probably have few wins but I think they're the most powerful class in the game.

I've illustrated the number of wins only to highlight the percentage. It doesn't really matter otherwise, since there are a lot of other factors as well, aka: ease-of-use, fun-ness, popularity, unlockability. Eg: Marauder is actually a very good class compared to most, but last time I won, there's only about 1 page of winners all the way from 1.0.0 version.

Dump the damage boost and resistance penetration and simply make it a 100% conversion talent.

Exactly.

I kind of feel that TF was already stronger, and the nerf to MT was actually larger.

Your wish is actually granted grmbl guy Temporal Form just got nerfed to 50% conversion only in SVN.

And Through the Crowd had been buffed to grant +10 saves for each friendly mob in sight. Which is quite nice I guess, though I love SageAcrin's idea much better (transfer your stats to the mobs). Working through the crowd!

[HousePet]

As the only talent source of mind resistance penetration, I don't think removing mind resistance penetration from mental tyranny is a good idea.

50% conversion to mind and 30% resistance penetration would be good.
No need for the +10% damage.