make Fearscape cast range melee

[evouga]

Players could mitigate that with stun resistance, though (which is not a particularly bad idea as it is.)

High-level elites with stun immunity would be likewise immune, but the biggest problems with NPC fearscape occur mid-game.

[Grakor456]

Honestly? Fearscape is already of dubious use for PC Corruptors as it is due to the ridiculous Vim costs between it and Flame of Urh'Rok. My recent Corruptor winner already never found much use for it. Reducing Fearscape's range doesn't seem like it'd be very helpful to survive it: melee characters will have to get in melee range anyway, and they're the ones at most risk to dying to it. Reducing its damage makes it more dubious for PC Corruptors than NPC ones, since reducing its damage further (when most Corruptors don't stack +fire damage anyway) would make it near-useless against the giant health pools NPCs have (at least, any NPC you might consider Fearscaping.)

Making it break on stun might work, but that doesn't seem intuitive.

[Sirrocco]

What about dropping the vim costs, them? Make it short range to cast, and constrained space (as with my earlier version of the idea), but drop the vim costs a fair bit (6-[talent level] per turn, say, so you'd still have 5 per turn at level 1, but if you max it, it's a much more reasonable 1 per turn.)

[evouga]

Why is it NPCs never seem to run out of vim? Do they have huge pools relative to players?

[Grakor456]

Why is it NPCs never seem to run out of vim? Do they have huge pools relative to players?

Partially that (what with most of the more dangerous corruptor enemies being higher level than the player) and partially that they don't have as many sustains to maintain (the corruptor boss in the Slime Tunnel, for example, is already a demon and thus doesn't need to sink the 90 vim into keeping up Flame of Urh'rok.) At least, that'd be my guess. So, most of the time, either the NPC is dead or the PC is dead before vim runs out. It's possible for them to run out, though: play a corruptor and grab Flame of Urh'rok yourself, get Fearscaped by the Grand Corruptor, then run around like a crazy person for a while as you get healed by his spell. You'll eventually get booted out from the Fearscape as he runs out of vim.

What I'd buff if this spell got nerfed elsewhere is the sustain amount. 180 vim held hostage in total by Fearscape and Flame of Urh'rok is rather silly when you're -also- getting hit for 5 vim per turn. The vim cost per turn is, I imagine, to compensate for how strong the effect is and to discourage just running circles around rocks while enemies die, so that probably needs to stay. Dropping the 90 sustain cost on both Fearscape and Flame of Urh'rok would make a nice buff for PC corruptors that wouldn't impact NPCs too much.