Yet another Cursed Hate-recovery idea

[bricks]

I was tooling around with the idea of Gloom allowing passive hate regen (hate regen proportional to the number of enemies in the Gloom, bonuses for higher-ranked enemies, capped total hate per turn) and found it was lacking. There was simply no tactical value to it, and the balancing I tried to do was on a razor's edge, swinging wildly from "completely unobservable" to "spam away". However, it certainly made the early levels more fun, and it allowed me to explore levels a little without fear of totally running my damage and defense into the ground.

Based upon that experience and given a little more consideration, I propose the following mechanic: when striking targets affected by the Gloom (that is, gloom-based confusion, stun, and slow), generate a small amount of hate (approximately 0.03 would probably be most appropriate). There are a number of advantages to this:

• Not a perfectly reliable means of hate regeneration, so pursuing other sources is still valuable
• When fighting multiple targets, you may to make a tactical choice over focusing on a single target or trying to attack enemies affected by Gloom to generate hate
• Could scale with target rank so "cold encounters" with bosses are more approachable
• Easy to work into the current mechanics
• More or less equivalent to the other means for Cursed to generate Hate, apart from killing (cursed weapons and resource-leech equipment)
• Talents that hit multiple targets in melee gain extra utility (as does allowing yourself to be surrounded by multiple targets)

I'm going to make this change myself and see how well it works; I'll edit with the modified file(s) if/when I get it working.

EDIT: 0.03 proved way too little to incentivize my gameplay choices. I have changed it to 0.1, and made it scale (directly) with target rank. Attached is the modified Actor.lua file (you will need to fix the extension); the relevant changes are in the onTakeHit function. Currently it does not check that any damage is actually done; that should probably change.

EDIT2:

I made it to Prox with my Cursed Higher (my typical choice, dwarf, was making it difficult to test that the skill was working). Of course, by the time I found him, my hate had worn down to nought. Thanks to the hate-on-hit mechanic, I was able to build my hate up high enough to have some moderate defenses and land the occasional Ruined Cut. It turned a probably impossible fight into a just-barely-survivable fight. Afterwards I max'd Gloom and just entered Norgos' Lair; we'll see how well this continues to play.

[benli]

Let me know how this turns out. I like the idea of bonuses for hitting gloomed targets and scaling with rank. I've been trying some other things for addressing this as well. I'll summarize them in a new post.

[bricks]

0.1*rank seems like it might be a little too much at times, but the desired functionality is there. With good positioning I was able to spam skills and still get a net gain of hate. Main issue I saw was that the Gloom effects took a considerable amount of time to show up (especially when compared to Gloom Weakness, which I did not include for the effect), so single-target hate recovery could be tricky at times. Also, the effects don't have much of a duration, so paralyzing an enemy with Gloom at a range wasn't particularly helpful. Now that I have Blindside, it should be much easier. Note that all of these tests have been for starter zones and low player level.

Glad to hear you like the idea.