Elmental Surge tweak...

[Delmuir]

Elemental Surge is kind of a terrible prodigy but I think it can be made much better without radically overhauling it.

How? Two points:

1. Make the bonuses stack. Obviously, this would be a rare occurrence but a pretty snazzy one.

This would allow a Sun Paladin, for example, to potentially generate large damage shields (I can't recall if the shield overrides regular damage shields but it shouldn't... it should stack on top or be separate and parallel) if they get lucky and get two or three in short succession.

An Aether-based Archmage could generate massive casting speed bonuses which could really make use of the cool-down reductions from Aether Avatar and the Meta category.

A cold-focused mage or Alchemist could generate significant armor and damage on attack, which would solve a crap-ton of the cold-mage's problems, namely its close-quarter combat design. Extra armor would make it an impressive tank.

Lightning and nature would only generate in increased duration, which isn't bad considering how powerful the effect is for both (although Nature is a little specialized).

The clear loser on the stacking is Fire but I think Fire is crazy powerful as is so... whatevs. I don't think it has to be "consistent" in that sense of the term.

2. Make the effect possible to generate on a regular attack but just rarely, like 3.33%.

It's 30% on a crit, which seems fine to me.

This gives you a 33.33% total chance of generating the effect IF you have 100% crit, and an 11% chance of hitting two in a row, and so on.

It'd be pretty rare to stack those bonuses but when you did, it'd be pretty great. Of course, you need to rest and let things cool down so it's not like you can stack said bonuses to the point of absurdity but it'd be pretty darn useful in long fights and whatnot.

In my opinion, this would make this a top-notch prodigy.

Thoughts?

[HousePet]

That might make it worth while.

However, one thing that bothers me about Elemental Surge (and Endless Woes) is that it tends to do things that you can already do.
Fire Archmage already has the Fire cleansing.
Ice Wyrmic has the Cold effect.
Sun Paladin/Anorithil already have damage shields.
Oozemancers pretty much ignore magical effects.
This makes it less attractive to the classes that it should be good for.

[Delmuir]

This makes it less attractive to the classes that it should be good for.

As far as I can tell, that seems to be the dominant design principle in this game. It seems like most everything is designed with the idea in mind of making it counter-intuitive or not useful at all to the classes that need it most or could use it most naturally.

Having said that, yeah... I agree with you BUT it does open up some options. It'd dramatically make the cold-archmage better, dare I say even useful.

If the damage shield was parallel then it would make illuminate a nice coupling with the close-quarter requirements of ice, along with the Celestial Light tree, further bumping up damage shields, assuming it can trigger on said spell... which it should, and the description doesn't suggest it wouldn't.

Consider it: you'll have disruption shield which means you have two aether spells... gain some increased spell casting speed, reduced cool-downs with meta (works great for ice, which already has short cool-downs), increased armor and damage, and then added damage shields.

It'd allow you to turn a mage into a Cursed-style murder-machine, wading into the thick of mobs.

Now personally, I think that the crit mechanic for spells is applied wrong... it ought to be "on hit" and not "on casting." In other words, one casting of a spell should check each enemy it hits to decide if it crits or not. More so, bonus to crit ought to be much lower.

But that's just me...

[e1337ist]

To me these prodigies always seemed most fitting for classes that deal multiple types of elemental damage in possibly quick succession, like wyrmic or alchemist or an archmage that grabbed a couple spells from each tree, rather than for builds like paladin or a fire-only mage.
With that said, what always put me off was the combination of it being a passive and having a 12 turn cooldown on the entire skill. It basically means you're forced to open a battle with a specific element, otherwise you waste Elemental Surge triggering the fire effect before you have debuffs, or the nature effect in a fight against purely physical enemies. Then, if it's a long battle, you have to carefully plan your skill use so you have a talent off cooldown with a useful element, so you don't, again, trigger something less than ideal.

In short, its kind of clunky and takes too much micro-management for my taste.

I'd like to see one of two changes made:
A) Lower the cooldown of the skill to five or six just to throw numbers out there, and put a separate 12 turn cooldown on each individual effect. Skills and effects can now be used more freely and efficiently, but you're still not completely free from debuffs or permanently armored. The numbers probably need rebalancing since different effects are happening more often.
B) Make it an instant-use talent that grants you the buff Surging (or whatever) for a turn or two. The next elemental damage you do that meets the requirements triggers its effect, and the buff is removed. You can now use skills completely freely and effects are only triggered when they are explicitly desired. The cooldown can remain the same. You might even argue it could be higher because the reliability has been increased. Numbers could potentially need a little rebalancing but not as severe as above, I don't think.

Either way, it remains useful(ish) for wildfire mages or paladins or oozemancers, and classes that can get the most out of it actually do get the most out of it.

[Delmuir]

I forgot about the cool-down... that needs to go away because that makes the prodigy just useless. Come on, a 30% chance to trigger a skill on a crit? Ridiculous.

Besides, my suggestions make no sense with the cool-down.

[HousePet]

Oh, I just assumed that making the bonuses stack included reducing the cooldown to 1 turn.

[e1337ist]

And I forgot it only triggers on crits, and only 30% of the time, which makes an instant with a one or two turn buff pretty unreliable haha.

I must say I'm against the idea of removing the cooldown entirely. A couple of those would be very strong. Lightning in particular would basically mean immunity to damage in a 1v1 if you could give it 100% up-time, and I would go out of my way to dig tunnels and engage 1v1 in that scenario. The idea of light, arcane and cold stacking is interesting though. I feel like arcane and cold would definitely need a cap to prevent you from casting spells instantly or insta-killing anything that hits you in melee. If light were to stack, the strength of the shield should probably come down, because I could see that getting out of hand very quickly on a shield paladin with weapon of light. On the other hand, reducing the strength would make it less appealing to shadowblades and archmages with illuminate, who cant stack it because of the cooldown on their only light spell. The more I think about it though I dont see why different elements couldn't have cooldowns of different lengths. Then they could be balanced fairly independently, instead of giving them all a long cooldown because of lightning (or whichever), and then giving the others high values because they have a sizable cooldown. I feel like I'm starting to talk about complex coding now though and I'm sure the devs want to avoid that as much as possible.

As far as the chance to occur, I like it more as an on-crit than I do on any damage with a very low rate. Let's say all your crit chance is coming from cunning, which is probably not the case at the end of the game. if you have 60, which you probably will if you took this, you needed 50 anyway, you have .3*60=18% crit chance. If this is going off on 30% of your crits, that's a ~6% chance of occurrence, which is already higher than 3.33%. My Sun Paladin winner had 43% spell crit, for ~13% hypothetical chance to trigger surge. I've heard it suggested you can get very near 100% crit if you focus on it, and if it's a serious concern, Halfling is always a choice.
The 30% chance on top of crit requirement is a pretty big bummer though. These are effects you need up as often as possible or in pretty specific situations to get the most out of them. It would be nice to see that removed, especially if crits are to be required. I cant say for sure it wouldn't be too strong of a change though.

[HousePet]

If you can make enough spell crits per turn to maintain the Lightning Elemental Surge, I think you deserve that sort of immunity.

[e1337ist]

If you reduced the cooldown to 1 it really wouldn't be that unimaginable, considering it lasts five turns. If the chance of it happening were improved (which would, otherwise, be nice) it would probably hit at least 20%, as I mentioned I got close to 15% already without really trying. What do you know, that works out to 1/5, and you can cast channel staff every turn. Sure, sometimes it won't go off and you'll have to use an inscription. Still, that doesn't sound like balance to me.

[HousePet]

Oh, I thought it was shorter duration.

[e1337ist]

That's the beauty of this thread, it can be!

Sorry, I wasn't trying to shut anyone down q.q