Cease to Exist: Would this be a viable Paradox Mage talent?

[Aquillion]

Essentially, you'd activate it in advance (which would take 1 turn as normal) and give you a long-duration buff which has no immediate effect. However, while it's in effect, the game would tally any damage you take and from which enemy.

Any time before it expired, you could activate Cease to Exist (which you'd gain as part of the talent) at instantaneous speed to try and instantly kill a non-elite/boss enemy in range. If it fails to kill them automatically (or if they're elite/boss), it still does substantial temporal damage. Using this would terminate the effect and put the whole thing on cooldown.

If the enemy is successfully killed either way, it heals back any damage they did to you since you prepared the initial buff. (Possibly, just a percentage based on level.)

Duration, damage, chance of instant death and percentage healed could all increase with talent level.

Effectively, you remove an enemy from the timestream retroactively, healing recent damage they did to you (since you activated the initial buff.) The cooldown and paradox cost would be fairly high -- this would be more of an emergency button or a bit of extra damage than a primary offense, of course. The fact that you can spend a turn to set it up in advance, then don't have to spend a turn to 'expend' it for the extra damage means that it'll still be useful and interesting (not just another blasty talent) even against enemies who can't be instantly killed.

Do you think it's doable? Do you think it could be balanced?

[edge2054]

Interesting idea. I've been toying with a few different ways to replace Damage Shunt (it's pretty boring) and something like this would fit the Paradox tree and still have a defensive nature.

Another way to do it would be to make it a single spell. Maybe a timed effect you could put on an enemy that would deal temporal damage over time and track all damage they deal to you. When the duration expires it could attempt an insta-kill. If the enemy dies while the debuff is active or from the insta-kill effect you would be healed of all damage it did to you.

The only problem I really see with it is from a game balance perspective, I think in practice it would be really underpowered and to situational. Your approach would be more viable but harder to code.

Maybe if it reduced the target's damage in addition to the rest of the effects it wouldn't be so bad.

Any other thoughts? Aquillion's approach quite frankly I have no idea how to code efficiently and my approach feels to situational to be of much use but the idea has potential.

[edge2054]

Another thought, just a debuff that reduces all damage done to and by the target to 0.

[bricks]

Here's a similar idea, and I think it could still be used for bosses:

1) Cast Cease to Exist on a target, it lasts X turns. The game is saved.
2) If the effect expires, nothing happens.
3) If the target is killed, the saved game is loaded, and the target is then killed in that timeline.

Still extremely situational. It would be great for fights with lots of tough foes, since you could cast Cease to Exist, blow all of your long-cooldown abilities on that target to kill it, and then start the fight over with all of your abilities ready. I think all of the mechanics are already available for this, except perhaps killing a target after reloading.

[edge2054]

Nice one Bricks

[Grey]

Another option would be a similar spell called "Fade from Time", which would simply be a negative debuff that may kill the enemy upon expiration.

1. Cast Fade from Time on enemy
2. Enemy takes increasing temporal damage over time, whilst also having its own damage output increasingly reduced (stacking penalties to spellpower, mindpower and physpower).
3. If debuff isn't cleared then the enemy is killed at end of duration (chance to save, and elites or higher immune - which of course includes the PC on non-insane mode)

It would be handy when facing several enemies and you want to reduce the threat of one whilst taking down the others. The killing thing at the end is more a bonus - against weak creatures the temporal damage may take them down earlier.

[edge2054]

I got Brick's version of Cease to Exist coded up. I'm thinking I'll combine it with Flawed Design (so it reduces the targets resistances while it's active) and turn Fade From Time into an instant cast defensive buff that reduces the casters damage by 10% and increases it's resist all by X% while it's active. When the duration expires the caster will get back 50% of all damage it received as a heal.

Should make the Paradox tree more interesting and more paradoxical and replacing Damage Shunt and Flawed Design with spells that aren't just copies of other spells will be good

*edit* I'm not dead set on the heal at the end, I like the idea from a mechanical perspective but not sure it fits completely. Maybe duration reduction on debuffs while active would be better, like Resilient Bones.

[Frumple]

Odd idea, riffing on timeless -- have the duration of (other) positive status effects increase as negative ones go down, for the duration of whatever the paradox talent's effect is, probably for a net effect of simply causing the positive one's duration to not decrease as long as you've got negative statuses decreasing. Basically, using the decay of the bad effect to halt the decay of the good effect. A weaker timeless effect, more or less, that only does anything when you're under a negative effect.

Might be an interesting defensive mechanic.