Revised Berserker and Skirmisher Feedback Thread

[Fortescue]

I don't understand? None of what you say would change the problem/situtation I described. If you make the melee block better, you encourage skirmishers who position themself in the middle of a group of enemies to get counter shots of and never using breathing room.

I'm very confused here. If I remember correctly, the skill gives about 35% fatigue reduction. In one of the betas, it allowed you to have fatigue below 0%, i.e. make it so all your skills cost less stamina than normal. Now, it still has the same reduction, but doesn't ever reduce your fatigue below 0%. So while before it was equally useful on skirmishers with light armor as on skirmisher with massive armor, now it's only useful if you have a lot of fatigue. Why was this changed if you didn't want it to (because it seems like it was working as intented before)?

Acrobatics is going to be disabled in heavy armor soon, should have been from the start. Getting surrounded is never what you want, it doesn't matter what your build is. For one thing, it makes it impossible to aim your only AoE skill, even assuming you don't die very quickly as a result.

I never wanted Pace Yourself to interact with Fatigue at all, for any reason, ever. That was just a shortcut the coders took that lead to an undesired end result. It was meant to only give a discount on Stamina costs, not any other resource.

[Fortescue]

You're not going to convince me that losing 2% hp / turn is equivalent to the old negatives. It is barely noticeable in most fights even before you have lots of regen, though in long event battles like The Mouth you probably should turn it off. As far as out-regening it, yes that will happen eventually if you gear for it. The thing is, regen gains are not percentile, while this cost is. The higher your HP get the more regen you will need to outpace it, making it a little bit tougher to stay ahead of than losing a flat 10 armor. As well, the bonus crit mechanic makes stacking HP a lot more attractive than it used to be, since before the only consideration was mashing Unstoppable and not caring what your max hp were. You can still play like that now, but at least there is a reason to stack HP.

[Ragnarok]

You're not going to convince me that losing 2% hp / turn is equivalent to the old negatives. It is barely noticeable in most fights even before you have lots of regen, though in long event battles like The Mouth you probably should turn it off. As far as out-regening it, yes that will happen eventually if you gear for it. The thing is, regen gains are not percentile, while this cost is. The higher your HP get the more regen you will need to outpace it, making it a little bit tougher to stay ahead of than losing a flat 10 armor. As well, the bonus crit mechanic makes stacking HP a lot more attractive than it used to be, since before the only consideration was mashing Unstoppable and not caring what your max hp were. You can still play like that now, but at least there is a reason to stack HP.

It's equivalent to the old negative in the effect of the reason why you stated on why you changed it in the first place, so people don't put a couple of points in it and only turn it on early game for quick boss kills and entirely ignoring it because in long battles with alot of weak stuff you kill anyway before you have enough points for regen + mass crit it isn't worth it to turn on.

All your doing is repeating what I'm saying but ignoring my point that I'm completely making that the ability works out the same early game as the old rage. The ability succeeding in being a good remake for the ability but the usage of it early game is almost literally the same as it was before.

Let me try to put it another way, when you would actually use the ability 100% all of the time (around 15-20) is when you can make the downsides almost negligible (-10 armour, at that point you have Armour in total with higher value then that) or now (-2% regen in which now you have the bloodthrist tree running ) with the early game if you put any points it in at all before level 9-10 is turning on low levels of it just to help with bosses. If you planned to make the ability worth investing and using early game outside of that then it didn't change but the ability rework in general was good, I wasn't disputing that.

[Fortescue]

I used it from the moment I unlocked it. I only turned it off in a few specific circumstances such as The Maw, which is an extreme case where slightly faster killing and stun resist doesn't actually help you much anyway.

[bpat]

Skirmisher needs at least one more category, possibly locked and possibly shield-oriented. Since all but one of the shield talents are passive, shields don't really feel important; there haven't been any moments where I thought "I wish I put more points in that shield talent." Bash and Smash is good but it's nothing more than a melee knockback attack.

As for other categories, Kill Shot needs to have the bonus damage from range scale with talent points. I was consistently hitting for over 1,000 with criticals at range 10 with only 1/5 in the talent. Kill Shot is probably my favorite Skirmisher attack talent and I really like its design, but it could stand to be nerfed a little. Noggin Knocker's stun should increase with talent points too. Other talents are mostly fine although Kneecapper should also have slightly better scaling with talent points.

Acrobatics is great but I still don't think Field Control should be locked, but I know a lot of people will probably disagree with me on that.

I haven't played the new Berserker much yet but I've used the Two-handed Assault (I think that's the name) category on Sun Paladins and I really like it so far, especially Fearless Cleave. I don't like the idea of losing health from Berserker Rage but I haven't really tried it yet so I won't really judge it until I give it a shot.

[Castler]

Maybe it's kinda off-topic but first : get patchnotes straight please! Those you have are not specific enough. For example I still have no idea what have you changed in each class. Not everybody is expert so will remember every talent and every tree.

ToME Tips has a detailed list of changes in 1.2.x here (and I've just finished updating it for the 1.2.1 release).

(I don't have anything to contribute to the actual thread topic, because my life is too hectic to play ToME right now. )

[Davion Fuxa]

I decided I would give a Dwarven Berserker a whirl, as a bit of detour from the Skirmisher. So Far I've cleared through the Dwarven Starter dungeons, and beat all of Trollmire, Norgos' Lair, Scintillating Caves, and the Derth Arena.

I quite like having two debuff abilities from the start with the Berserker. Both are also quite powerful when they have their talent levels increased as well. This is a good change. I didn't bother investing in Berserker yet since Stun and Pin resistance isn't really a concern early on, I can do without the Physical Power and Accuracy boost, and I rather not play with the loss of 2% life per turn yet. I am tempted to try out Shattering Blow and Relentless Fury but I'll worry about that after playing with Death Dance some more.

On skills then - the two main ones of real note here is Fearless Cleave and the revised version of Death Dance. Fearless Cleave pretty well resulted in an early death when I went to the Deep Bellows - as such I've left the talent at 1/5 until the 2 turn bug has been resolved. I still occasionaly use it for hitting enemies up close but obviously that's a real weak use for it on a Berserker unless I have stamina to burn.

Death Dance is a skill that makes me pause in thought a bit. It use to be a simple skill that just hit all enemies around you; many players would just drop a point in the talent for its poor scaling. It's damage still scales pretty poorly, but now at level 3 it has a chance to inflict Bleed for 5 turns; the bleed damage is enough to make a difference early on for the Early game. However, past that I am not sure how useful getting a little Bleed damage will be by itself - before investing in Bloodthirst. Also, Death Dance still scales fairly poorly past Talent level 3 - I'm not sure how useful it might be to get the talent to 4/5 or 5/5 in the long term.

[edge2054]

Just want to reply on Death Dance.

Death Dance has some of the best weapon damage scaling in the game only being outpaced by Shadow Step, Nature's Equilibrium, Impale, Steady Shot, and Bullshot. It does the same amount of damage as Dream Hammer. And it's the only one of these talents that's an AoE.

Berserkers also have access to Shattering Impact, which makes Death Dance even more ridiculous. In my opinion it didn't need a buff before it got the bleed damage and it really doesn't need one now.

[Jurriaan]

I seem to have unlocked skirmisher with a berserker without a shield?
Possibly because the monster did something:

Small Nasty Critter uses Shattering Blow.
Isakira the forest troll is dazed!
Small Nasty Critter hits Isakira the forest troll for (75 blocked), 113 physical, 11 blight, 2 mind, 15 fire (142 total damage).
Isakira the forrest trol is not dazed anymore.
Isakira the forest troll uses shield slam.
The shattering blow creates a shockwave!
Option unlocked: New Class Skirmisher (Rogue)
Bleeding from Small Nasty Critter hits Isakira the forest troll for (75 blocked), 111 physical (112 total damage).

Also, 111 physical damage is not 112 total damage - there seems to be a rounding error in the damages (also in the line above).

[Fortescue]

Stuff about Death Dance saying Bleed might not be useful.

Go read the new talent just before Unstoppable. There is a reason it adds Bleed now

[Davion Fuxa]

Just want to reply on Death Dance....

Perhaps I failed to spell it out but I was referring to Death Dance's scaling 'Per Talent Level'. I fully agree that Death Dance (both before the update and after) has some of the best damage in game for what it does, but that doesn't mean the damage from increased Talent levels is worth spending more then the points you need in it; unless they don't have anywhere else better to put excess Talent Points.

Before the update players spent 1 Talent Point and moved on - this wasn't because Death Dance was a filler skill, it was because it was a 'One Point Wonder' skill. The only change with the new update seems that a player will likely want to spend 3 Talent Points to pick up the additional Bleed Effect that Death Dance inflicts when brought up to that level - this being do to the fact that's it's a noticable increase in damage early on and synergizes with Bloody Butcher down the road. Nothing here has really changed on player intent to continue investing in the Talent for more damage as you don't get enough of an increase from the damage with additional Talent Points spend to justify it.

Go read the new talent just before Unstoppable. There is a reason it adds Bleed now

I see nothing with Bloody Butcher saying it gets improved by making your Bleed inflict more damage. Unless that's more hidden knowledge that wasn't included in the Bloody Butcher's Talent description or unless Death Dance increases the turn duration of the Bleed Effect that it inflicts, getting a little extra Bleed Damage and Upfront damage from initial use of the skill is probably not worth spending 1 or 2 more Talent Points.

[edge2054]

I maxed it on my first winner. The thing about talent damage is that it's multiplicative with pretty much everything. Once you factor in weapon mastery and +damage gear that bonus damage on talents really starts to shine.

Steady Shot is another talent like this and I've never heard anyone complain about the lack of scaling on it.

[Davion Fuxa]

I maxed it on my first winner. The thing about talent damage is that it's multiplicative with pretty much everything. Once you factor in weapon mastery and +damage gear that bonus damage on talents really starts to shine.

Steady Shot is another talent like this and I've never heard anyone complain about the lack of scaling on it.

Steady Shot is definitely not like this - you get double the damage increase by increasing the talent level on a skill that has a cooldown of 3 and a low stamina cost. Without going with full investment on the talent it is a horrible skill that only does 10% more damage then your regular attack. We are also talking about a Berserker who basically thrives in 'bump attack's due to many powerful passive/sustain/Unstoppable - generally you get more bang out of non-Activatable talents with this class and that doesn't seem to have changed much.

[Fortescue]

Davion Fuxa I think you're missing my point. I don't care about the actual damage on the Bleed and you shouldn't especially either. The primary benefit from it is that it exposes tough enemies to taking lots more damage from the Bloody Butcher passive.

As far as maxing it, you would want to max it so that you kill as many enemies in 1 turn as possible since it has an 8 turn cooldown before you can do it again.

[Ragnarok]

Davion Fuxa I think you're missing my point. I don't care about the actual damage on the Bleed and you shouldn't especially either. The primary benefit from it is that it exposes tough enemies to taking lots more damage from the Bloody Butcher passive.

As far as maxing it, you would want to max it so that you kill as many enemies in 1 turn as possible since it has an 8 turn cooldown before you can do it again.

Doesn't change how you actually play the game.

You can:

1. One point wonder it
2. 3 points for the bleed to combo it with blood butcher some more damage
3. 5 points if you have extra points that you don't need to put somewhere else for maximum damage.


Nobody is saying you should never max it, there's just clear point usage optimization here. At 1 point 3 point (most recommended) 5 points (very good choice if you want extra damage)

3 to 5 points only add 20% weapon damage but adds 50% bleed damage

Theoretically how you should use things isn't always applicable outside of a vacuum.