Which Egos Need Fixing?

[Requia]

I'd also love to see HUGE boosts to one spell… I'm not sure how much but I regularly see +.14 and stuff like that to entire categories but how about a much bigger boost to a singular spell? Maybe +1.5? Maybe that isn't big enough or too big… such a bonus could also work in conjunction with a negative effect in order to balance it out...

.14 is pretty big as is, keep in mind its multiplied by the number of points in the talent, .2 is worth an entire category point (and I've seen a couple with .2 or higher). 1.5 would be insane, .7 would take you from a .80 escort benefit all the way to max.

[Delmuir]

I don't have a good sense of the balance on that so I was guessing so thanks for giving me some context. My goal was to overpower single spells at the expense of something else just to play around with builds… just a thought.

[SageAcrin]

Taking a quick tally here for things that are considered underpowered/overpowered and commenting on them to some degree.

Underpowered:

Various slots. (I do not approve of power creeping up various slots, however, and think that different slots having more/less impact than others is good.)

Spread resistances. (I personally stack tons of these and love them? I am not the only one that has debated this, either.)

Robes of Chaos. (Debated later.)

Light non-Robe Armor(I feel like these mostly need a big Defense buff to start with. High end ones should cap out around 35, low end should be more like 10 with 15 on Artifacts.)

"Regen", but the same post mentions 0.15 regen, which is a value so low as to not be on any egos anymore? However, I think artifacts still have some really low regen values, maybe this is where this comes from. Artifact life regeneration values could stand to be retooled.

Striking/Void egos on wands(Later debate on Striking but not Void), and various resource recovers(Perhaps the resource recovers should all be converted to +resource cap like Vim was?)

Greater Mage Robe Prefixes(These were specifically not coded to be overly offensively strong, to prevent insanely powerful ego mage robes that would outclass high tier artifact robes).

Randart mindstars, due to fixedart mindstars having more mindpower(Given the low amounts of power that Mindstars work with, it's extremely hard to do this without making a non-trivial amount of insanely overpowered randarts. There's also somewhat of a question in my mind if those fixedarts shouldn't be instead nerfed, rather than buffing everything else; There's not many ultra-high mindpower fixedart mindstars, and they tend to be outliers.)

+power/save gear(All the gear that only provides these is either early or provides large blanket boosts. Early egos shouldn't be as powerful as later ones, due to a progression curve being psychologically appealing. Also, due to the game being built around the concept of progression.)

Overpowered:

Magewarrior Short Staves.
Short Staves in general? (Should this include Telos Top? Any mage oriented single handed gear, like Life Drinker?)
Dragon ego(Debated later in the topic as possibly not overpowered. Personally I find Dragon and Hardened to be balanced but powerful egos and like them quite a bit. Considering the heavy gear requirements of heavy armor users, I'd rather not see them randomly screwed.)
Thunder ego(I wouldn't have a problem with knocking this down a bit, it's an experimental high offense low defense armor ego. I would like to see more feedback from people that play the game on difficulties where concrete durability actually matters though.)
+critmod(I talked to Shibari about this recently; This is something that needs its own thread though, not a tiny mention, as it is very sweeping and gamechanging, and very much nerfs the player.)

Conclusions:

So far as I can see, the main thing is that there aren't many really imbalanced things-if egos are getting debate, they're probably not too far off balance.

Magewarrior Short Staves seem to be the main one; I definitely support removing the spellpower/spellcrit/crit modifier from them.

Light armor seems to be the most agreed upon other issue; Boosting defense to 10-15 at the low end and 35 at the top end seems like a good start. Perhaps some more interesting light armor egos? Thunder could be moved to light armor only as a start, as it's seen as a very powerful ego?

[Strongpoint]

Melee weapons of balance deserve a boost, maybe better scaling, maybe additional benefit

[SageAcrin]

I actually find +defense weapons pretty good in the earlygame(for the classes that really care about Defense, at any rate), which is what lesser egos are for. 10,5 isn't really a small value, either; It's as much defense as you get off main armors.

[Doctornull]

Some Power and Save boosting egos are only useful in your first dungeon, and are quickly outmatched and cast away. Later on, they become a joke because they're scaling is terrible, if non-existent:

Yeah, that's my experience as well. Thanks!

There are probably more that I can't think of right now.

Please do think of them

Cold damage boosts… I find not nearly enough of this, especially on powerful gear.

Also, resistance cap boosts… I'd like to see a bit more gear with small bonuses to a resistance cap. I generally think that if you add +5% to "x" resistance cap then the gear should come with at least a +10% of "x" resist.

Interesting, thanks.

Weak ego's:
helms and boots are pretty weak in general. Wizard hats are the exception, they're best on almost everyone, but caps and helms are pretty bad.

I hear you. I'll try to balance the different hat types as options.

Strong ego's:
armor of thunder, it's way too good.
Crit chance/crit mult ego's are way too good. Warmaking gloves and cloaks of conjuring/backstabbing are also incredible. Battlemaster cloaks got a huge nerf with the scaling change and aren't very good anymore.

Thanks.

Melee weapons of balance deserve a boost, maybe better scaling, maybe additional benefit

Agree, at mid to late game they're not adding anything notable as compared to +% damage or +% crit.

I guess one solution is to make these non-scaling things stop appearing after the very early game, but that feels unsatisfactory.


Thanks everyone, please keep reporting your experiences with imbalanced egos, either too strong or too weak!

[SageAcrin]

Agree, at mid to late game they're not adding anything notable as compared to +% damage or +% crit.

I guess one solution is to make these non-scaling things stop appearing after the very early game, but that feels unsatisfactory.

Balanced weapons are 10, 5. They scale from 5 to 15 over the course of the game.

I guess upping them to 15, 5 would probably be safe?

[Isotope-X]

Volcano can get absurd when coupled with lots of talent-on-spell gear. Fiery Choker in particular causes each rock that hits to have a 10% chance to spawn another volcano

I recently had this on my Paradox Mage, and it did seem to trigger WAY more than 10%, now I know why. I also had the artifact gloves which provide Chain Lightning (Storm-Weaver's Gloves or something like that), and I think that each link in the chain also provided a chance for more volcano goodness. It started to feel unfair.

That didn't make me stop using it, of course.

[Doctornull]

I guess upping them to 15, 5 would probably be safe?

Sounds like a step in the right direction.

Volcano can get absurd when coupled with lots of talent-on-spell gear. Fiery Choker in particular causes each rock that hits to have a 10% chance to spawn another volcano

I recently had this on my Paradox Mage, and it did seem to trigger WAY more than 10%, now I know why. I also had the artifact gloves which provide Chain Lightning (Storm-Weaver's Gloves or something like that), and I think that each link in the chain also provided a chance for more volcano goodness. It started to feel unfair.

That didn't make me stop using it, of course.

Heh. I wonder if there should be some kind of cap on spell procs per spell.

[SageAcrin]

There is. One proc per turn per proc type.

(So "Volcano 10%" can only proc once per turn, though it can attempt to proc off any number of spells until it gets that one per turn.)

[Orangeflame]

Is there a way for egos to increase/reduce the ego multiplier of their item?
That could be the fix to magewarrior's short staves - they still get their awesome bonuses, but the other egos are nerfed.

[SageAcrin]

That strikes me as a pretty good idea, if possible.

[Mewtarthio]

Magewarrior's short already takes up a greater prefix ego all by itself, so it's really just the one suffix ego you're nerfing. Plus, having an ego that changes the ego multiplier sounds like it'd be trouble to code.

[Orangeflame]

IMHO, most of the OP-ness comes from Magewarrior's- appearing on a randart, in addition to other greater prefixes like magelord's and infernal.
I've had randarts that outclass the Awakened Staff of Absorption, disregarding the one-handedness entirely.
EDIT: took staff out of vault. [strikethrough](as of right now, check my item vault: http://te4.org/user/62972/itemsvault )[/strikethrough]

Maybe also reducing the weird "-damage to one element, equal +damage" effect from would also be in order.

[Delmuir]

Volcano can get absurd when coupled with lots of talent-on-spell gear. Fiery Choker in particular causes each rock that hits to have a 10% chance to spawn another volcano

I recently had this on my Paradox Mage, and it did seem to trigger WAY more than 10%, now I know why. I also had the artifact gloves which provide Chain Lightning (Storm-Weaver's Gloves or something like that), and I think that each link in the chain also provided a chance for more volcano goodness. It started to feel unfair.

That didn't make me stop using it, of course.

I don't think this kind of "overpowering" is necessarily a bad thing. Why shouldn't there be a handful of small combinations of items (that you'll rarely find in a game together) that can overpower you for a little bit?

It's not like every play through would have a player searching for said items. If they're too common, that's a problem but I've rarely run into that problem. Only once have I ever found a "perfect" or close to it, combination of gear that make the game a bit easy and it was definitely fire. Of course, that character breezed through most of the game and then died (all of its lives) against the final bosses.

It's such a rarity but it breaks the monotony of the game. It's like winning the lottery… every once in a while, you'll get a break and big parts of the game might be significantly easier.

If you eliminate all of that kind of thing then you make the gameplay experience so narrow as to be dull. Every build and every character and every play through would be equally difficult.