Cursed Ruminations (Aka Brainstorming)

[Micbran]

Razakai, for predator I'd love to do a more "bestial" styled blood tree.

As for a sustain, sustain, passive, passive, sustain, what's the difference to Cursed? But yes, a mindpower increasing talent of some sort would be of great use to Cursed, especially since a majority of their talents and trees focus on physical power with the exception of Gloom.

Overall Razakai, I'm liking the 5 minute sketch. Surge could be renamed and fill the mindpower niche while the 4th talent gives a bonus for switching between forms because they are still mutually exclusive, yes? As a result there should be some bonus for switching between them, even if they all do serve a different purpose. Something like...

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Switching to Deflect grants projectile slowdown, increased armor and defense(relatively useless?). 
Switching to Cleave grants phys power, bonus attack speed and bonus movespeed(incredibly similar to rampage, needs refining).
Switching to Surge(or whatever it's renamed to) grants temporary mindpower and enchances gloom's effects by x%. 

All of these effects (except for maybe Surge's) are a little boring so I'll probably come back later and fill them in with something a little more interesting.

[Davion Fuxa]

As it is right now, their is no reason to invest points in more then one of the talents of Surge, Repel, or Cleave; this being due to them being mutually exclusive. The idea I suggested was to change it so that the three former capstone talents would 'give' their benefit regardless of what you might be using - and then there would be a new capstone talent on top of them to deal with benefits for wielding a specific weapon type; thus helping to eliminate the problem of only investing in a specific talent and not others because you can't use them all at once.

[Razakai]

Yeah that's a fairly good idea. My current plan is that the first 3 talents are mutually exclusive sustains, but can be learned in any order, and also grant a portion of their effect while not sustained - so you can get all 3, but one of them you focus on. Then the 4th talent gives bonuses when you switch. Or perhaps triggers an active effect? E.g. Cleave does a powerful melee whirlwind, Repel gives a defensive buff, and Overwhelm (placeholder name for mindpower one) triggers a debuffing torment pulse around you.

e: draft for Strife (the new sustain tree)

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Strife
(note - the first 3 talents can be learned in any order)

Cleave | 10 Cooldown
Every swing of your weapon has a 19-40% chance to cleave to a second target for 100% weapon damage.
If there is no valid target you will ready your weapon, granting you 10-25% of a turn.
While this talent is sustained, the chance to cleave is increased by 50%.
Cleave, Repel and Overwhelm cannot be active simultaneously, and activating one will place the others in cooldown.

Repel | 10 Cooldown
Rather than hide from the onslaught, you face down every threat. 
You have a 19-27% chance to deflect melee and ranged attacks.
While this talent is sustained, the chance to deflect attacks is increased by 50%.
Cleave, Repel and Overwhelm cannot be active simultaneously, and activating one will place the others in cooldown.

Overwhelm | 10 Cooldown
Your presence overwhelms the mind of others.
Your mindpower is increased by 17-50% of your physical power, and if a target resists a mental effect from you their mind save is reduced by 5-30 for 4 turns.
If they repeatedly resist mental effects, the duration of this effect will be extended and stacks in power.
While this talent is sustained, the bonus mindpower and mind save reduction is increased by 50%.
Cleave, Repel and Overwhelm cannot be active simultaneously, and activating one will place the others in cooldown.

Assail | Passive
<INSERT FLAVOUR HERE>
Does a thing when you activate a sustain - the nature of them means you can't cycle through all 3 repeatedly due to activating putting others on cooldown.
Cleave - Radius 2 whirlwind, inflicts heavy damage - 180-300%? Maybe add an armor/save shred too.
Repel - Duration 8 damage shield for high amount. Or a bonus to armor/crit reduction?
Overwhelm - Radius 2-6 mind damage pulse that also inflicts stun/blind/confuse/silence (torment) for 3-7 turns.

[Micbran]

Active effect sounds far more interesting and useful. I'd go with that. Cursed doesn't need more passives after all. The repel defense just needs some figuring out. Perhaps some sort of thing like Trained Reactions for a temporary time.

[Razakai]

Alright, here's the first draft for Cursed unlocked class trees, and some design thoughts. After I get Archer sorted out and 1.5 is live I might gather some more feedback and consider writing an addon for people to try out.

https://hastebin.com/igezevixag.http

[Davion Fuxa]

I'll read that in a moment, and just post these thoughts here for now.

Predator and Fears..... I personally can't say I've used either of them or really care too. While Predator is unique in how it works, it doesn't really seem to to mesh well with the gameplay in practice because it is too 'focused' in its use, and is based on killing enemies of that focused group. Then you have Fears which apply debuffs to enemies; which are thematic but the delivery needs work. I'm not sure if Predator can really be saved as is, but Fears certainly can. Some ideas in relation to Fears:

-Instill Fear for example could actively apply a Fear of your choice to a specific target, corresponding to Talent Level (maybe raise Fears Category to 1.2 so you can have 6 levels)
-Make it so that Heightened Fear will cause Instill Fear to randomly cause different Fears to nearby enemies, along with randomly picking up new Fears when you happen to be within N Tiles of them when they have a Fear on them - Fears being applied not corresponding to what Fears you can apply with Instill Fear.
-Leave Tyrant more or less as is, boosting your mindpower when using Fears. Maybe add some additional effect to it.
-Panic is technically fine as is, though it is possibly a bit weak as the capstone.

Maybe change order of Fears to be something like Panic/Instill Fear/Tyrant/Heightened Fear

[Micbran]

https://hastebin.com/ibadufobak.sql

Here's current thoughts for predator. Open for feedback (especially the 3rd talent).

Everything looks good with that quick sketch Razakai. No problems here. I'll give it a closer look some time later.

[Davion Fuxa]

So some initial thoughts:

So, how is Blindside going to work for enemies? I'm not sure how the Hate Resource works for example, but I'll note that Worms the Walk are already plenty scary right now since they can Blindside you out of nowhere; is it going to be possible that on top of the Worms that Walks high offensive they may be able to run around with a 1 turn super evade too?

I think the Movement Speed on the Rampage is a bit over the top, but that might be more in respect to how the Hate Resource might pan out.

Otherwise I agree with Micbran, it looks mostly good.

[Davion Fuxa]

Hrmm. I'm not sure what to say about Micbran's Predator Talents. The current Cursed doesn't really do any Bleed effects and we already have Sawbutchers and Berserkers making heavy use of Bleeding effects. However, something to throw in as well is that Razakai has taken Cursed Wound off of Slash; Cursed Wound never really being all that awesome with its Heal Mod Reduction, but something unique to the Cursed and perhaps something that can also be reworked.

Maybe as an idea would could have a new type of effect for Cursed Wound and shove it in as the detrimental effect being applied. It could cause DoT much like Bleed with Physical Damage, or it could be doing something else - maybe Mind Damage? Maybe instead of Open Wounds extending the duration of the effect, it could instead increase the amount of Mind Damage that the target will take per turn; then when you fire off Satiate, it would give you health based on the amount of Mind Damage the target is taking at that moment - encouraging you wait until the effect is almost finished before firing off your talent for the greatest effect.

[Razakai]

I think a lot of things depend exactly how hate works out. It may be for WtW etc that without Rampage they can't unlock the threshold bonuses of Slaughter talents perhaps.

Yeah not sure about bleed yet - but a 'Cursed Wound' equivalent could be good. The current Predator is a bit weird and encourages odd behaviour like the aforementioned hunting adventurer parties to tune yourself for final boss. One advantage of a dark/mind wound would be allowing it to bypass bleed resistance. We should probably make it interact with Hate/other Cursed things in some way. Perhaps this could take the form of an 'advanced' Slaughter tree that you'd take if you preferred spending hate on actives? I'll have a think about it. My other idea was an advanced Gloom tree that empowers Gloom and does various other things at higher hate, so you have a bit of a build path decision - stick with passive stuff and high hate for Gloom, or Predator for actives? Could also give Predator something that works better at low hate - then you have a nice cycle of building hate to 50+, burning it with specials, then using some Predator stuff to regen.

[ster]

rework looks good, only thing i'd like to add is that unnatural body could be less of a straight nerf to healmod, and it seems like max hate boosting items (and enemies which IIRC go over 100) have been ignored. oh and they don't have a reliable stun but that's probably fine with all they have and slash/gloom RNG will eventually do it


e: how to make hate not a terrible resource: have it floor at like 50 instead of killing a rat, getting .5 hate, and then your 50.5 decaying to 25.25 so you always have some available but not much (with the rework it'd be like 6 turns to go from 0-100 and the fight is probably over by then)

[Razakai]

Yeah maybe give them a reliable stun in an advanced tree but I think the ability to spam random debuffs via Gloom and Slash is prob enough. Didn't consider +hate items either - maybe hate should actually just scale from 0-100 and replace +max hate stuff with hate on crit etc? Might interact weirdly with Doomed so not sure. Wouldn't be opposed to Unnatural Body not nerfing healmod at all and just giving like +0-50% heal based on hate level.

What might be worth trying with Hate is have it always decay to 0 (or maybe like 25 so you can open with a few hate-using talents) - but tune hate gain in such a way that you can hit a decent level quite fast. Perhaps some hate gaining effects scale inversely based on how low your hate is - so you enter at 0, rise to 50 in a couple of turns, then have either a steady rise to 100 or hover around midrange from using lots of talents. I think getting hate perfected is going to take a lot of playtesting and a few potential ideas.

[astralInferno]

I really like the fantasy of getting more than 100 hate, though I expect its rare enough that it doesnt actually happen very much. If possible, that's something I'd want to keep. Being able to 'supercharge' your talents is pretty compelling, if it actually ever happens.

[Razakai]

Looking at a random selection of Cursed winners, over 100 hate is relatively rare anyway (was briefly concerned people were regularly hitting 200 hate or something!). Probably wouldn't hurt to allow talents to scale over 100 slightly, or just leave it as going from 0-100 and have it be so that being over 100 means you get the ability to use hate consumers while still having Rampage maxed out.

[Mordy]

Above 100 Hate might be uncommon because there's no real benefits to it currently?