Fixing high level Talents

[lukep]

Another two heavily abusable ones (because they approach 0): Pity and Suppression. At talent level 8.5 Suppression gives 100% reduction to the duration of nonmagical detrimental effects. At talent level 8.6 Pity makes you visible only two tiles away.

[jotwebe]

I can't help but wonder: why do npc's need to cheat on talent levels in the first place?

because I'd need to generate them with a full set of correctly matched equipment to their spec.

I'm also a bit sceptical if doped talent levels are the best thing to give NPC's their edge. I think most people designing those think about what'll happen at TL 5 and maybe mastery 1.7 or something and assume that's it.

I think it'd probably have less surprising side effects if they cheated with their stats. Although oneshot-grade damage would still be bad...

Range, cooldown, duration seem to be the most problematic, and they tend to run of TL and not stats.

[Gliktch]

Range, cooldown, duration seem to be the most problematic, and they tend to run of TL and not stats.

Wouldn't it be possible to implement a formula of steeply diminishing returns on things like range/cd/dur which won't change the 1-5 levels much?

I mean, if cooldown for a skill with fixed duration of 6 turns was calculated something like this:

Code: Select all

cd = 26 - (tlvl * 2)

Which results in:

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1/5 = 24
2/5 = 22
3/5 = 20
4/5 = 18
5/5 = 16

then an enemy would only need tlvl10 for it to become an always-on talent for them... But if it were modified to something like this:

Code: Select all

cd = 50 / (2 + tlvl/5)

And that gives us...

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1/5 = 22.72
2/5 = 20.83
3/5 = 19.23
4/5 = 17.85
5/5 = 16.67
...
tlvl10 = 12.50
...
tlvl20 = 8.33
...
tlvl30 = 6.25

So the NPC's talent level would have to be overshooting by 25 over the player's attainable level in order to achieve 'always-on', without much difference to player cooldown values. This is of course not taking into account talents which can reset cooldowns etc, or all the other complicated stuff that has to be factored in when levelling talents, but hopefully something like this can be worked in so that overlevelled enemies with high talents don't become easily 'broken' in their favour

[lukep]

Another one: (approaches 0) Evasion. It can make enemies invulnerable to melee characters for huge stretches of time.

[lukep]

Dimensional Step can reach very long ranges (25+), and is extremely powerful when combined with the boss's inherent player location ESP, effectively being a 100% counter to teleport runes as an escape option.

[lukep]

Random bosses now routinely get 100+ physical power and accuracy from stacking various weapon masteries and combat accuracy, compared to ~60 spellpower for a comparable caster, making even the highest saving throw values ineffective against them.

[Fela]

Just to put fuel to the fire, my (almost broken) 50 dwarf archmage with saves in the 60s was routinely stunned 20+ turns by a not too infrequent attack of a random boss based on the forge guard monster. On top of being a summoner and various burns, including, if i remember right, burning shock.

Admittedly, he basically killed me because i forgot to use ANY of my backup safety options i acquired but never got into a habit of using because of the broken DispShield (teleportation wands, stone wall...), but then what chance would a not broken class have had?

[lukep]

Darkest Light still allows drain values below 0 in b37.

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	getEnergyConvert = function(self, t) return 6 - math.max(0, self:getTalentLevelRaw(t)) end,

Should read:

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	getEnergyConvert = function(self, t) return math.max(0, 6 - self:getTalentLevelRaw(t)) end,