Reworking Chronomancy ver 2

[edge2054]

@edge2054: is there any particular reason why Trim Threads instakill isn't applied to targets below 0 health? This is strange and works unlike (mechanically very similar) Steak Sauce... er, I mean Swallow.

Because I copied old code that was never updated when die_at was introduced >.> I'll fix it.

I noticed that energy drain actually deals a nice chunk of damage on occasion even though the damage portrayed in it's description is fairly low. Is the displayed damage actually multiplied by the amount of talents of the enemy that you put on cooldown?

*edit* also it would be nice if dropped items would preserve in the temporal reprieve, like they do inside opened vaults or the sher tul fortress.

There was a bug in the test build that I posted that was causing Energy Drain to do X damage per talent the target knows rather than per talent it put on cooldown. I figured it out after I Energy Drained the weirdling beast for 700 damage But yeah, it does more the more talents you put on cooldown.

I played around a bit with that idea for Temporal Reprieve but couldn't get it to work easily. There's also the issue of the zone being persistent requiring a save (which would slow its use down quite a bit). If enough people request it though I'll see if someone more knowledgeable can help me pull it off.

[Parcae2]

Miscellaneous suggestion that just occurred to me, and that you may already have implemented: Invigorate should not have its duration or cooldown affected by Timeless.

[edge2054]

It won't have the cooldown affected.

Just finished up Matter PMs are now feature complete. I 'may' do two more trees but they'll be more horror/void oriented and will require unlocking. Some of these trees will probably end up locked behind an achievement fyi (like the archmage tree unlocks) but I'm going to hold off on that until after I do particles so I can hopefully get some playtesting and feedback on them.

I'm still open to balance suggestions and will probably rework Induced Phenomena quite a bit.

Do I need to put up another zip file or is everyone using git at this point?

[Parcae2]

woo

So we can work under the assumption that the class is "finished," and any further additions can be disregarded for balance? Because the AM advanced trees affect balance quite a lot.

[edge2054]

Yeah, they're finished. The other two tree ideas I have are really going to be for temporal horrors. I may or may not give them to Paradox Mages. Either way they're going to be darkness focused so they won't have much interaction with the other trees.

Induced Phenomena I'm going to take another hard look at it. But everything else I'm really hoping to get some good feedback on.

[Parcae2]

Initial reaction is, wow, that is a LOT of class trees. Maybe move Energy back to Generic?

[HousePet]

I shall go through it with a comb when I get a chance.

[tylor]

Another idea: Reality Bending tree. It's sustains that change reality globally or in some radius, effectively giving buff or debuff equally to you and everyone else, friend or foe.

Examples of effects:
- change one of speeds (movement, attack, etc) by certain multiplier
- change projectiles speed
- change healing factor
- change hp and/or other bars max and regene rate
- a chance of skills cooldowns going down or up
- change of resists or resist caps

[edge2054]

Reality bending could be a generic tree. I should probably take a break though from adding new trees and work on balancing But I'll keep it in mind if I decide to add some more trees.

Initial reaction is, wow, that is a LOT of class trees. Maybe move Energy back to Generic?

I locked matter and energy. I think these two trees and time travel will be the only ones PMs have to start. And I kinda like the Matter/Energy pairing as unlockable class trees Warp, Induced Phenomena, and Spellbinding will probably all be gotten in game somehow.

If I end up leaving one in from the start I'll probably strip the damage out of energy and make it generic.

[Parcae2]

OK, I've looked at the class slightly more.

-The Insane Temporal Reprieve Interaction of the Day (TM) is Reprieve + Extend + Redux = Trouble. You can't quite get up to infinite Reprieve with that combo, but it's close enough to cause balance problems. Admittedly, you'd need to spend three category points to get there ... I still think that Reprieve needs to be exempted from Extend and maybe Redux as well.

-This class has a cwaaazy number of places to spend class points. Moving a tree or two to generic might help, but I'm also starting to agree with what Kiba said about talent point taxes. Changing the scaling on the defensive talents so that they don't benefit as much from leveling might be a good idea.

-Phase Shift is crazy powerful. People spend an infusion slot just to get two turns of that effect. Bear in mind that the first attack of the round is usually the worst and can be the only one. I'm thinking maybe 4ish turns, fixed, with a scaling chance of avoiding a second attack each round and a very long cooldown. Then it actually becomes an interesting tactical choice rather than an obvious autocast on sight. I would also recommend making it an Other effect to remove Timeless shenanigans. (That goes for Temporal Reprieve as well).

Finally, an overarching comment: Having multiple cooldown reduction/duration extension talents on the same class is bound to cause trouble. Offhand as I type this post, I can remember about half a dozen: Extend, Matrix, Reprieve, Absorb Energy, Redux and maybe some others as well. Then you've got Timeless, cooldown reduction from gear ... None of these should interact with any of the others at all, and they all need massive cooldowns, like 40 at least. Following Tyler's idea, I'd suggest that one of them be replaced with a talent that resets your HP to full and removes some status effects, but also does the same for every enemy on the level.

Fake edit: Changing when the trees are attained will make dungeon choice more interesting, but it doesn't change the underlying issues, unless you also make a few trees mutually exclusive. That said, I don't think that they necessarily have too many class trees, as such, especially since so many of them are locked. (I'm assuming that the ones that will be obtained through gameplay will still be locked). Genuine choices are awesome, and one of the best things about this rewrite is that PMs now have a ton of them. Rather, it's more that I think some care needs to be taken to ensure that players aren't spending 25 points on defensive options and 25 on cooldown manipulation, leaving a paucity of class points for offensive options and ensuring that point-intensive offensive choices (like Gravity) are neglected.

[Parcae2]

Oh, here's another game-breaking combo: Contingency -> Redux -> Extended Temporal Reprieve. I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty sure that you can get more or less infinite Reprieve that way.

[Parcae2]

Triple post, sorry.

One thing I've also been thinking about is smoothing out the leveling curve. That one fateweaving damage reduction talent (sorry, don't remember the name offhand) should probably be Tier 1 and should not scale with spellpower. I would also move Contingency to Tier 1 or 2, extend the cooldown (unrelated but a good idea anyway) and allow it to trigger non-spell abilities as long as they aren't summons. All the really imbalanced combos are spells anyway, and that would let people use it on regen/healing infusions early on.

Edit: I felt that I should also mention that, balance tweaks aside, the new PM is AWESOME.

[Parcae2]

I like to think of this less as quadruple posting and more as having my posting cooldown reduced by Matrix.

Anyway, I think some of these trees could usefully be given to TWs, notably Matter and Warp.

[HousePet]

Trim Threads says it does damage to all other targets?

Does Bias Weave allow you to recover turn energy from instant cast anomalies, or anomalies that are a deliberate part of the talent? eg. Disentangle. If so, Preserve Pattern would be rather OP.

Gravity looks less synergistic than it used to be. No ideas though.
I'd swap the positions of Gravity Spike and Gravity Well. Along with lowering the damage on Well and increasing it on Spike. Reasoning is that current layout is damage, damage, buff, disable. Spread those damage talents out a bit.

3 turn duration on the stat drain of Paradox Bolt is a bit cheap.

Paradox Mastery is bleh. Temporal resistance pierce?

Could Wormhole allow you to send target creatures through on creation?

Haste and Time Stop have the same function, and Haste is way more interesting.
How about replacing Time Stop with something that lowers enemies speeds in a similar way to the way Haste increases yours. Then if you are using Celerity to get some distance between you and the enemy, you can hit the Time Stop replacement then stand still and blast the movement slowed enemy.

Damage on Rethread looks a little bit high for a negative resource cost.

Temporal Fugue description needs rewriting.

I'm not sure about the numbers on Energy Absorption. I never felt I needed more than one point in it before, as I was rarely being hit for triple the absorption value. Now with the way the new cooldown reduction bonus works, I'm not sure I'd ever put a second point in it.

Don't like the damage on Energy Drain. I want a debuff. Same with Entropy.

Typo in Carbon Spikes: 'addtional'.

Matter in general: I don't think charges will generate fast enough to have three talents running off them and I wouldn't be happy with having to loose my armour bonus to use the offensive talents. I'd just use Warp instead.
I suggest making the armour/hardiness bonus not based on the carbon charges, and don't remove them when you are hit.
Also, Sphere of Destruction isn't worth being a separate talent on a mobile class such as this. Make it so that you can target Shard Storm at level 5. Replacement talent could have a quick charge creation effect?

Enduced Phenomena is freaky.

Description of Cosmic Cycle is faulty, it contains one more parameter than slots for them.

Not sure about Spellbinding. It seems more like generic magic than chronomancy. (and now I think about, I have a zone planned that would be the perfect location to get this category...)

Perhaps Phase Shift could reduce the damage rather than negate it?

[edge2054]

Thanks for the feedback all. I'll keep it in mind as I keep balancing things.

Contingency I've given a fixed cooldown of 50 since it now scales in a couple of other ways, I reduced the duration of Phase Shift, and fixed the description of Cosmic Cycle. Temporal Reprieve is an other effect. You can't hit it with Timeless. I'm debating what to do about the other interactions. I'll probably put it back on a fixed cooldown but that would remove it from Contingency again (which I kinda like the interaction of). Reduxing it is indeed broken though.

As far as possibly moving some trees to generic the ones that stand out the most to me are Speed-Control (I'm hesitant to put speed effects in a generic tree) and Energy (would need to strip the damage out which wouldn't be hard but I kinda like Energy Drain and Entropy dealing damage). Energy would be the prime candidate, my personal feelings aside.

Time Stop has come up a few times. I'm debating taking the two turns of extra damage penalty off of it. The issue though is that you can throw down bolts, dots, or AoE and once the Time Stop expires they'll do full damage. I don't know if this is that big of a deal but I don't want to see players getting one shot by Time Stopping rares either. Granted the Time Dilation requirement makes it easy for a player that's paying attention to keep this from happening. Thoughts?

The only spell in Spellbinding that doesn't deal with time is Empower. I'm open to suggestions on a replacement but there's only so many ways you can really modify the time of spells.

Gravity does have less synergy but the talents stand better on their own now than they used too. I'll consider swapping Gravity Spike and Gravity Well.

Bias Weave is a multiplier in the useEnergy field in the anomalies code. It has no effect if the anomaly isn't consuming energy.

Trim Threads, that's my way of saying selffire = true in a talent description.

Matter is very strong. I'd ask people withhold judgement until they've played with it.

Paradox Mastery too. I get that it's a bit boring but it lets you sustain more spells or just run at higher Paradox for bonus spellpower. Giving it temporal resist pen I've considered but I don't want it to be a required talent.

Which talents feel like talent point taxes?