Escorts... Lore Master is overpowered. Maybe? Discuss.

[Delmuir]

The Loremaster grants one of three powerful abilities...

Each has a very short cool-down and crazy utility.

Now, Spit Poison is hampered by being equilibrium-based so unless a class has a natural way of reducing equilibrium, it's limited, which is good.

Disarm is limited by saves... especially at higher difficulties. Still, very strong.

Mind Sear though... yowzer. A two-turn cool-down, high damage beam, good range, AND runs off of a naturally refilling resource of which you likely have tons of. Mind Sear is a beast of a skill but as an escort reward, it might be too much.

The escorts can be amazing, if you get a good run with them, but on a class like Doomed (or even a Summoner but do you really need help?), Mind Sear is stupidly overpowered early on. It lets you conserve hate to a remarkable degree.

I believe that Vitality is kind of ridiculous on a Cursed or Sun Paladin but it's not even close to how insane Mind Sear is on any mindpower utilizing class.

My premise is this: are these abilities too powerful? Should, perhaps, the Loremaster be nerfed or eliminated entirely? If these abilities are critical (and I believe some of them are) then isn't that just bad class design?

Discuss.

[Micbran]

I can't say I've ever relied on getting mind sear as doomed or any of the other talents from the lore master. That being said, they are still really good and incredibly powerful. On doomed, mind sear, like you said, does not consume hate and is out of your normal range as most doomed talents are around <6 range.

But... What about the celestial light category? On corruptor, (which I don't play much of) I hear it's near mandatory... Which is just bad for corruptor to have such a crippling weakness. The need for reliable sustain, status cleanse and defense is so strong that they have to have a 0.8 mastery category. That to me is bad class design.

To be honest, I probably cheer audibly when I get a warrior, Anathoril or lore master. What they offer is much better than other escorts. So either... Make escorts less common and buff the skills they give or just nerf those by changing the talents offered. Maybe have warrior give a choice of dual strike, stunning blow or shield slam?

[bpat]

Disarm lasts two turns, it's decent but not that great. Spit Poison scales horribly. Mind Sear is often a waste of a turn past the early game because it's 0.8 in a talent that does mind damage so if your mindpower is low it does very little damage and if it isn't...still very little damage. The only talent that's actually good outside the early game is Disarm. When stuff like Healing Light, Track, Dream Walk, and Chants are available Loremaster is at best around the middle in terms of quality.

[Frumple]

Won't lie, I think this is the first time I've ever actually seen loremaster called overpowered

Still, I... wouldn't really consider mind sear that good? It saves for half damage (unless they changed that for mind damage while I wasn't looking, anyway), runs off stats most classes don't mainline, and from what I recall the range isn't particularly sexy either... though checking, it's a little higher than I (apparently mis)remembered, 7 vs 6, which either way is not 10, hehe. Plus at tlvl 1 it's not really enticing damage wise (if you get more loremasters it's nicer, but... that takes getting more loremasters) beyond the earlier parts of the game, from what I can recall. There's a reason solipsists start using other talents as the game goes on, heh. It is nice on mindpower classes, and a pretty alright filler or ranged poke on most, but it's not exactly what I'd consider critical, m'self.

Disarm's iffy (plenty of things in the game will cheerfully beat your head in without a weapon -- it's a lot more dangerous for the player) if nice enough (I really kinda' dislike it on actual stamina classes, though... usually would much rather be spending my stamina on core talents), spit poison is... is. Conceptually high damage, iirc (and checking the code, it actually looks like it scales better than mind sear does if I'm reading it even remotely correctly), if you're building the stats that scale it, but... it's poison.

Still, I would be pretty happy if loremaster got some talents that were actually attractive instead of damage, damage huge chunks of the game is immune to, and crappy damage with fairly inconsistent debuff, sure. Honestly, I usually just take the stats for loremasters -- I'd rather scale a bunch of talents up a bit than get one that may or may not be used much. Generally have enough talents to worry about with the class to deal with another one that's probably going to fall off as the game progresses anyway, yeah.

Insofar as general escort stuff goes, none of them are necessary in the least, which is one of the reasons they've consistently not had their AI improved (though there's addons for that, and also addons that provide access to talents even if you don't find/kill all the escorts you wanted). Plenty of them are very nice, which... they should be, considering the difficulty/annoyance and costs involved, y'know? But they're not genuinely critical in the least. Just make some classes have a notably easier time of things.

That said, it would be really nice if there were an alternate means of access to the tinkers cave besides those bloody braindead escorts.

[Davion Fuxa]

Wow, I'm impressed. Someone made a thread about Escort Rewards that didn't have an opening post blathering about Celestial/Light.

I think I'll echo a lot of what other people will likely say in future posts and state that I don't think that it should be removed.

And I don't really have more to say here. If this was Celestial/Light we were talking about I would say that if a class is finding the Escort Reward a necessity then something on that class should be addressed rather then the Escort Reward. That isn't really the case here though, rather we are talking about a talent that is just really good and worth picking up. That's fine in my opinion.

[HammyHamster]

Here's the thing about Mind Sear: Unless you have high willpower and unless you get multiple mind sear escorts (1+) when you are pumping willpower, it becomes less and less effective near end game. Especially on higher difficulties. It's a nice filler when you have nothing else to spam, but it will ultimately be one of your lowest damage attacks.

At higher difficulties, disarm often fails (as well as taking a valuable turn). So you need to decide the success chance vs just killing the enemy as fast as possible and not wasting turns.

At the very start of the game, it can be helpful.

So it's not a big deal and it's race-independent; even the silly Shalore race can't exploit mind sear any more than any other race.

[grobblewobble]

unless you get multiple mind sear escorts (1+)

Getting a single loremaster is not OP at all, and not even good. You cannot learn any category from a loremaster. You can only gain a single skill point, at mastery 0.8. Which means that the skill has such a low power that it is almost never going to be worth spending a turn on.

Since you cannot count on ever getting a second loremaster, I usually just get some stat points from them. I don´t like being stuck with a skill that ends up being useless.

However, if you play with a mod that lets you choose your escorts, forcing the game to give you five loremasters is suddenly a very strong option. But that´s cheating. It doesn´t make loremasters overpowered, it makes the mod overpowered.

[Mordy]

Since you cannot count on ever getting a second loremaster, I usually just get some stat points from them. I don´t like being stuck with a skill that ends up being useless.

I'd rather have an useless skill than 2 stat points. The useless skill can still be put in cooldown by stuns and in doing so, isn't useless anymore

[Delmuir]

An unsurprising number of condescending and inexplicable responses (not all though... some actually addressed the issue).

Grobble has my "favorite."

Mind Sear IS crazy useful... early game on some classes. To describe it as bad is objectively false. Doomed, in particular, makes great use of it early on.

Obviously it's only useful on classes that have a lot of mind power... geez, why would anyone even note that?

More so, obviously it's only powerful (but still useful) early on... comparing it to things like Celestial Light is comparing apples to oranges.

I keep making this criticism... this communities reflexive inclination to shut-down discussion instead of engage on the premise. It's intellectually sloppy and exhausting to boot.

Doomed, Summoners, Oozemancer, and Cursed... all classes with lots of mind power, resource issues, and a shortage of offensive weapons early on. Summoner doesn't need it but all benefit immensely.

All of the built in weaknesses of the class are mitigated by it. That's my point. Should abilities BE available that so radically change one part of the game? Is it too random?

The first dozen or so levels or so are made ridiculously easy on multiple classes with Mind Sear. That's the question... should that be the case? Suggesting that even one point into Mind Sear isn't good is for a while is utter nonsense.

[Frumple]

... the premise was "Is mind sear/loremaster overpowered?". Your initial post made absolutely no mention of what part of the game that's in regard to, nor how limited the stuff in question is outside of those particular specifications. The response was: "No, not really, and here's why." There... wasn't any shutting down, just disagreement. You're welcome to disagree in turn, of course, but as you've kinda' noticed, folks don't particularly think mind sear is overdone, nor loremasters out of line. The premise you presented* was engaged with, assessed as inaccurate, and reason given for the assessment.

Now, if you'd like to change that premise to mind sear being overpowered in the early game, as you seem to be attempting to with your second post... well, I'd still kinda' disagree (see below -- things like it are close to ubiquitous, and can be found on the ground), m'self, but you'd certainly have a stronger argument for it. Just don't get annoyed with people because you didn't make the argument to begin with, yeah?

===

Also. While cursed and doomed (especially the latter) can struggle in the early game, oozemancers are complete wrecking balls, and summoners can easily one-talent their way into the second tier dungeons, more or less without trying. The latter two have no shortage of offensive weapons (and really, cornac cursed don't, either -- rampage at character level 1 is rather powerful) and none of them have resource issues.** They can use mind sear, but it's not really giving any of 'em except doomed (and even then only barely -- the extra range is definitely useful, but it's far from vital) and maybe cursed much but making an already easy time starting off even easier -- and just about any equivalent attack ability will do the same. Y'can do it with the ruddy imp claw, and I don't think I've ever noticed anyone suggesting that is overtuned. Personally would say it's fine for there to be alternative options to dig classes out of particular holes in their kit, particularly early game ones.

I'll agree that Doomed can perhaps be argued to have too much of the stuff their class is supposed to worry about mitigated by mind sear (or the claw, or the eel skin armor, or a conjuration wand, or a half dozen other things), but... the problem there is doomed, not mind sear, y'know?

**Doomed have quite possibly the least concern over resources in the entire game, oozemancers are barely worse, cursed only rarely have trouble since hate generation was retuned, and summoners never use enough to be an issue until they're something like level 20 or higher, and by then they've got ways to just laugh at it. You've mistaken your assessment of the classes, y'ken?

E: *Though I do see you edited your initial post about the same time you made the second one. That... doesn't change where the responses came from, mate.