Reworking Chronomancy

[Doctornull]

The idea behind Swap + Fugue was building a pattern that Chrono based Confusion => Paradox reduction. That's a thing which would be unique to Chrono talents, but it's an intuitive pattern if we are consistent about it.

I really like the idea of Static History being turned into Anomaly Discharge.

Ooo, oo, have Paradox Mastery give the bonus stasis turns after ANY Anomaly, even an unintentional one. Then you're encouraged to walk the tightrope again immediately after you have just fallen off the tightrope. (Obviously you'd benefit more if you intended to cause the Anomaly, you'd get the base Anomaly Discharge turns + the bonus turns, but getting a cookie along with your Anomaly is still valuable.)

Regarding Spacetime Tuning, I feel like basing the per-turn reduction off your total Paradox might lead to more uniform resting, which is easier to plan and slightly more convenient to the user. IMHO user convenience is a thing that should be paramount for non-tactical, non-risky decisions. (IMHO if you can rest safely for ~50 turns in a row you should just get everything back.)

On the subject of user experience, the "safe" Paradox limit really needs to be displayed better. Ideally it would be displayed in the Willpower levelup doc area and in the Paradox Mastery doc area.

[HousePet]

Paradox management just needs a few numbers tweaks at the moment.
Faster Spacetime Tuning and another one or two, in combat, Paradox mitigation options would be perfect.
We have Rune of the Rift for a minor reduction.
Static History is a major reduction and a no fail period.
Perhaps Static History would be better if the two effects were separated?
One talent would take a turn to do a large Paradox reduction.
Another talent would be an instant that stops failure for a duration.
Then a Paradox Mastery that cranks your willpower bonus by a decent amount.
Finally a talent that just causes an anomaly to reduce your Paradox.
I like lots of options.

[MarginalMagus]

By the way Edge, if you want starting fights with non-zero paradox to be viable, please make sure new default values can be set via spacetime tuning, or something similar. I like autoexplore.

I also think that having damage scale up as a fight goes on is pretty cool already, and maybe starting at non-zero paradox isn't necessary as a design component.

[HousePet]

Sustains bump up your minimum Paradox nicely for PM.

[EatThisShoe]

A few thoughts:

I think paradox management is already reasonably interesting and Static History is useful, but not always a 5/5. Building on that I also want to disagree with the idea that Paradox mages have few builds, and also Doctornull's claim that Gravity and Matter are weak compared to Age Manipulation. I pretty much built my PM by the exact opposite philosophy and had great results using Gravity Well, Gravity Spike, Quantum Spike, and Destabilize as my main spells. My build intentionally skipped Turn Back the Clock and Rethread and thus ended up on the high end paradox wise, but was quite effective abusing those range 10+ spells and some of the best damage per cast spells available. Available at range 10 with no projectiles no less.

At the same time I acknowledge that builds using cheap low cooldown spells are viable, and those builds do not require 5/5 static history and 5/5 Gather the Threads just to keep from exploding. But that is the point, there are a lot of ways to build a PM even if you aren't choosing to unlock different trees, you just pick different spells and the variety is awesome.

That aside, I would identify Spacetime Tuning as a big weakness in the class. My main gripe is how it doesn't work well with autoexplore. Even set to autocast it often activates only after I have rested completely and begin autoexploring, or I have to rest, act once to trigger the auto cast then rest again. It's tedious to use even before we consider how many turns of rest it takes to actually lower paradox. I'd like to see an option to automatically rest until paradox expires, even if paradox is reworked to incentivize high risk play, I will always fall on the side that believes 0% failure rate is more important than pretty much any benefit high paradox would offer.

Willpower: I would like to see this be more useful, I feel like Paradox Mastery feels weak because it's a percentage of willpower which is weak. Items with willpower equivalent are way too high to compensate, but make the actual willpower:paradox failure relationship seem less important. Also, there really should be a clear indication of how much willpower influences paradox rather than trying to work out the formula mathematically through testing.

Static History: While I do feel that this skill works fine at a variety of levels depending on build, I also like the idea of splitting the "no failure for X turns" aspect to a different skill, it doesn't make a lot of sense to prevent failures after you have lowered your paradox, thus reducing your failure chance.

Chronomancy/Chronomancy tree: I just want to emphasize that I really like precognition as a skill. It's a bit annoying to use constantly, similar to Arcane Eye, but it has great control and the nuance of being influenced by what ever other tools you can use during precog to scout. If this tree gets reworked I'd like to see Precognition left alone, or rolled together with Foresight. The rest of the tree can go, or be reworked.


Time Warden: I don't have as much experience, but I just want to mirror the sentiment that sustain costs are too high.

[Salo]

Alright, back home. So I'm going to try to address your concerns Salo.

Obviously the rework you propose for spacetime tuning is an insanely big buff to paradox management. It is very easy now already, with that change you make it completely trivial and hence you would have to rework the whole paradox system to make paradox harder to use again. Perhaps you should double all paradox costs of spells? So you'd end up flip flopping between high and low paradox more often in a fight. If not, I see no point of having the resource in the first place if you make it so easy to manage it.

As I mentioned in my last comment Paradox cost and damage scaling was designed with 300 Paradox as an assumed base. So when I said Paradox costs would no longer scale up I should have clarified that they would start here. That said I'll probably take a good look at all Paradox costs including sustains. Sustain costs may go down a bit. Spell costs may go up. I feel some of these numbers, especially TW sustains, are an issue anyway that should be looked at regardless of Static History so doing it at once just makes sense.

Do you mean freeze the values to the cost they now have at 300 paradox? That's nowhere near enough to make up for your gigantic buff. Even making the current spacetime tuning not deactive on spellcast would be a very noticeable buff (which they absolutely do not need), increasing the paradox regen as much as you want would require much more than that.

Currently, paradox is completely meaningless before level 20 of so because the only spells you have cost maybe 10 paradox (at 300 paradox). You may have some that are more expensive, but not many and they all have cooldowns. So in the early game gaining 100 paradox in 10 turns is a lot (like, you'd have to spam only paradox spells to do this, not move/use infusions/use rethread/etc), so you only end up in problems after about more 50 turns of continuous attack without taking care of it (more in practice). In other words, it never happens. With your suggestion, you'd regain 30~40 paradox every 10 turns, so it's fairly obvious you make paradox completely meaningless early game.

Lategame you have more spells with high paradox cost, but also more items/inscriptions you want to use in between and have many paradox reducing stuff you could use. So you might gain around 200~250 paradox every 10 turns if you spam a lot and since you now are allowed to have a higher paradox, you still can fight for a very long time (50 turns if necessary), which is extremely extremely rare (maybe the final fight on nightmare difficulty?). With your suggestion you'd regain 90~100 paradox in those 10 turns and once again make the resource meaningless.

Again, it's probably theoretically possible to balance everything again, but you might underestimate the effort to do so. Your suggestion literally has a bigger impact on paradox management than spamming maxed gather the threads on cooldown and letting it go full duration each time. More importantly, I don't just want to show that your numbers are off, but that even with much lower numbers you'd already risk destroying the balance completely. It's also risky to want to overhaul it completely, it makes much more sense to start with small changes (ex: spacetime tuning does not deactivate on spellcast, but paradox cost of TBTC and time skip are slightly higher) and increment them very little if necessary afterwards.

Again, there are things that can be improved for PM and lots of things that can be improved for temporal wardens. Spacetime tuning should go faster when resting (or when you don't see enemies or something) for example. Temporal clone is poorly designed. It's possible to improve the class, but it's obviously also possible to make the class worse.

You also still haven't explained enough why :/ . Why is what you propose better and how? Obviously I can't force you to since you're the one who wants to change the class, but still it'd be nice since. I feel you are a bit misinformed about paradox mages and especially how good/fun the current paradox system is for them.

edit: typo's

There's a few reasons why. A big one is that I hear a lot of complaints. I'm glad that you found a build that worked for you but a lot of people don't find the class as fun as it could be. I hear a lot that Static History feels like a talent tax and it's something I've been trying to address via stuff like Rethread and the latest version of Weapon Folding. I also hear that it's too fiddly. In the end I think I'd just prefer to get away from Static History completely and go over to a system where the player is managing Paradox via non-fluctuating talent costs, a new and funner Spacetime Tuning, and more fun talents that also reduce Paradox in interesting ways. I really liked those ideas grayswandir and parcel just posted for instance and plan to work them into other talents.

Another reason is because I don't want Paradox management to be trivial but I do want to strike a better balance. If the class was working as designed players would feel encouraged to use higher Paradox values for the increased spell values and run the risk of spell failure and anomalies. Players that prefer the safer route would still have the option of investing heavily in stuff like Rethread but I don't want players to feel that starting every fight at 0 + sustains cost is optimal play. Some of this is part of bigger design issues that need to be addressed. I realize it's going to take some work.

Finally I'm just not happy with it. I'm glad you're having fun and I understand that your fear is that I'm going to come in and either nerf them on accident or ruin what you most enjoyed about them but I hope you'll just trust me on this. They can be better.

It is nice of you to listen to complaints.

However, you have clearly been (very) misinformed. I say "clearly" because one of the main complaint you apparantly hear is completely false, static history is not mandatory and not a point tax (edit: to emphasis this, the talent and paradox in general can be completely ignored the first 15 levels if you rest often enough). Another clear reason that you are misinformed is that people convinced you that PM don't have enough ways to reduce paradox, when the truth is that they don't need many in practice at all because of how much paradox you can get before you get in trouble and that they already have so many that not a single PM here maxed/used all of them. Again, it's good to listen to complaints, but when these complaints are based on things that are false, you should doubt whoever tells you this.

With regards to fun, etc. I don't think there's a single class that everybody likes. What parcel said makes me convinced that this is literally impossible. Very likely there isn't even a single class that the majority likes. So you have to decide between keeping the changes small so the people who already like the class keep liking it and between completely overhauling the class in the hope that the people who don't like it might like it more. It should be obvious that doing the second is much more difficult, much riskier and much more likely to result in nobody liking the class than the first option of changing small things gradually. It is your choice, but it should not be an easy one (edit: and it should be based on complaints that actually make sense).

edit: I forgot to mention: with your proposal for spacetime tuning, it would actually be extremely inconvenient and hard to start fights with paradox higher than the lowest possible, since you want to have spacetime tuning running before a fight already since otherwise you lose a turn to activate it and if you deactivate after a fight so you keep your high paradox, you also lose paradox. This seems to me like an unintentional side effect.

[edge2054]

First of all, thanks everyone for the continued feedback.

Salo, I hear what you're saying about Paradox costs and I'll be sure to take a careful look before I change anything there.

As to Static History. What I'm hearing here is that some builds can survive without capping it and that it's not required. That said, it's still the most obvious and most direct route to in combat Paradox reduction, especially for Paradox Mages. It's a boring talent and I'm not a big fan of it. But I'll focus on making it better/more fun rather than simply rolling it into Spacetime Tuning. I also like the idea of decoupling the spacetime stability buff and I'm still leaning towards spreading the Paradox reduction around a bit and making Timeline Threading unlocked from the start. I'll probably still include something like Static History, i.e. a big Paradox reduction mid combat, but I think I'd like it to have more interesting effects attached to it, possibly a random anomaly.

As to Spacetime Tuning. What I'm hearing here is that it's too fiddly, especially when it comes to resting. Personally I feel that it doesn't accomplish one of my design goals, which was to let players run around with high Paradox if they want too.

With that said here's my new proposal. I'd like to make Spacetime Tuning similar to how it used to be. You cast it and you set a value. But instead of immediately forcing the player to Tune after spell cast this value is saved and the player will tune towards this value, up or down, when resting. The amount gained back will be larger than it currently is so players aren't stuck waiting so much.

Hopefully this will bring enough automation to the talent that there's hardly any fiddling. You could set your preferred Paradox value once at the start of the game at 0 if that's what you choose and on resting you'd automatically Tune towards that value. I might even set this value at birth so new players don't even have to worry about it.

In effect the Chronomancer would be able to rest to recover or gain Paradox depending on how Spacetime Tuning is set and the player would rarely have to mess with Spacetime Tuning.

Good?

[Salo]

First of all, thanks everyone for the continued feedback.

Salo, I hear what you're saying about Paradox costs and I'll be sure to take a careful look before I change anything there.

As to Static History. What I'm hearing here is that some builds can survive without capping it and that it's not required. That said, it's still the most obvious and most direct route to in combat Paradox reduction, especially for Paradox Mages. It's a boring talent and I'm not a big fan of it. But I'll focus on making it better/more fun rather than simply rolling it into Spacetime Tuning. I also like the idea of decoupling the spacetime stability buff and I'm still leaning towards spreading the Paradox reduction around a bit and making Timeline Threading unlocked from the start. I'll probably still include something like Static History, i.e. a big Paradox reduction mid combat, but I think I'd like it to have more interesting effects attached to it, possibly a random anomaly.

As to Spacetime Tuning. What I'm hearing here is that it's too fiddly, especially when it comes to resting. Personally I feel that it doesn't accomplish one of my design goals, which was to let players run around with high Paradox if they want too.

With that said here's my new proposal. I'd like to make Spacetime Tuning similar to how it used to be. You cast it and you set a value. But instead of immediately forcing the player to Tune after spell cast this value is saved and the player will tune towards this value, up or down, when resting. The amount gained back will be larger than it currently is so players aren't stuck waiting so much.

Hopefully this will bring enough automation to the talent that there's hardly any fiddling. You could set your preferred Paradox value once at the start of the game at 0 if that's what you choose and on resting you'd automatically Tune towards that value. I might even set this value at birth so new players don't even have to worry about it.

In effect the Chronomancer would be able to rest to recover or gain Paradox depending on how Spacetime Tuning is set and the player would rarely have to mess with Spacetime Tuning.

Good?

Yes, I like this . This all sounds reasonable. More variety in which spells you chose to reduce paradox, spacetime tuning that doesn't require 200 turns between fights to reset paradox and chosing your ideal paradox level all sound great. After thinking about it a bit, it's indeed counter intuitive that the spell that prevents failures first greatly lowers the chance of failures (it'd make more sense if the paradox is lowered at the end or if one of the two effects was split to another spell) and while there are other alternatives, it might be a bit too good compaired to the other choices (so in the end everybody will get it no matter what).

I'm looking forward to seeing which other ideas you can think of, considering how much I like some of the cool ideas you have implemented already.

Sorry if I argued my point a bit too agressively, I simply reacted that way because I had the impressions the changes would significantly impact how the class is played and make paradox even more easy to ignore than before (read: more boring). But it seems like you are aware that balancing is something that needs a lot of attention so I'll have faith in you .

[edge2054]

Sorry if I argued my point a bit too agressively, I simply reacted that way because I had the impressions the changes would significantly impact how the class is played and make paradox even more easy to ignore than before (read: more boring). But it seems like you are aware that balancing is something that needs a lot of attention so I'll have faith in you .

I think it's great that you're so passionate about the class. It helped me see some things from a different point of view and has been really helpful

[MarginalMagus]

I like it too, Edge! By the way, one of the things that makes Spacetime Tuning fiddly is that in order to have it auto-activate correctly post fight, you have to spend a turn before resting or auto exploring. This is true of other things like stealth too, so it's more of an engine issue, but it's extra relevant to Spacetime Tuning, and worth keeping in mind.

[HousePet]

As a short term quick fix (to be put into 1.2), could we get Spacetime Tuning to run as a passive regeneration while resting?
Similar additions to Mana Surge runes and Meditation have made them much less fiddly to use.

Something like -Spellpower/10 Paradox per turn, while resting, would do nicely.

[edge2054]

Assuming I can remember how to make a patch I plan to email this tomorrow.

Code: Select all

newTalent{
	name = "Spacetime Tuning",
	type = {"chronomancy/other", 1},
	points = 1,
	tactical = { PARADOX = 2 },
	no_npc_use = true,
	no_unlearn_last = true,
	on_learn = function(self, t)
		if not self.preferred_paradox then self.preferred_paradox = 0 end
	end,
 	on_unlearn = function(self, t)
		if self.preferred_paradox then self.preferred_paradox = nil end
 	end,
	action = function(self, t)
		function getQuantity(title, prompt, default, min, max)
			local result
			local co = coroutine.running()

			local dialog = engine.dialogs.GetQuantity.new(
				title,
				prompt,
				default,
				max,
				function(qty)
					result = qty
					coroutine.resume(co)
				end,
				min)
			dialog.unload = function(dialog)
				if not dialog.qty then coroutine.resume(co) end
			end

			game:registerDialog(dialog)
			coroutine.yield()
			return result
		end

		local paradox = getQuantity(
			"Spacetime Tuning",
			"What's your preferred paradox level?",
			math.floor(self.paradox))
		if not paradox then return end

		self.preferred_paradox = paradox
		return true
	end,
	info = function(self, t)
		local preference = self.preferred_paradox
		local modifier = getParadoxModifier(self, pm)*100
		local _, failure = self:paradoxFailChance()
		local _, anomaly = self:paradoxAnomalyChance()
		local _, backfire = self:paradoxBackfireChance()
		return ([[Use to set your preferred Paradox.  While resting you'll adjust your Paradox towards this number over ten turns.
		
		Preferred Paradox : %d
		Paradox modifier  : %d%%
		Failure chance    : %d%%
		Anomaly chance    : %d%%
		Backfire chance   : %d%%]]):format(preference, modifier, failure, anomaly, backfire)
	end,
}

Is there any other information you guys feel should be included in the talent description?

[edge2054]

Tweaked a few things. Here's a screenshot.

http://i.imgur.com/arW5rzf.jpg

[MarginalMagus]

That looks like an excellent improvement!

[Doctornull]

My ideal Paradox info display:

- Current Paradox <value>
- Current Chance to Fail <%>, Anomaly <%>, Backfire <%>
- Preferred Paradox <value> (change per turn <value>)
- Failure Starts At <value> (Willpower mod <value> / Equipment mod <value>)