Buff antimagic

[Laerte]

Antimagic is weak right now, most agree with that. I prefer it would be a tree of just - better - passives effects and utilities. In fact I would prefer all generic trees that way. I think only classe trees should have attacks. As to manaclash, just make it give a percent of all damage as manaburn for a few turns, somewhat like the Mental Tirany prodigy.

[anonymous000]

Sorry to bump this old thread up. With 1.5 coming maybe it is time to revisit the antimagic tree and how manaburn damage works. Being a specialization route that a character could take with heavy consequence, it demands attention. And judging from the replies I see most people agree that antimagic could do some changes.

For people who do not want to read all the posts in the thread, here is a summary of changes suggested in the replies. The bullet points are independent to each other

Resolve:
- add a passive equilibrium regen per turn
- Buff the existing regen and make it applicable when Antimagic Shield is sustained
- Add some stacks of buff as you take elemental attacks, which lets you deal manaburn damage as you strike and reduce equilibrium as your attack lands
- Tie in Resolve with Manaclash such that when Manaclash is at level 5, Resolve gains a resource burn feedback ability such that all magic attacks drain additional resources equal to (depending on level of resolve) up to... say 150% added of resource cost of that spell. Have it take effect only after the first strike and hits the target AFTER the attack hits, i.e. turn 1, caster attacks normally. Turn 2, caster attacks normally but resolve takes effect and reduces damage and then sends a feedback which burns extra resources.

Antimagic Shield:
- Antimagic Shield should block way more damage, like at least 1.5 times what it currently does.
- keep the current power level but have 50% of the damage be absorbed and 50% reflected back onto the attacker. Since the current max absorb rate is around 80 damage/attack (with maxed mindpower), this seems a reasonable way to switch some of the pure defense to offense without being overpowered.
- As Antimagic Shield absorbs damage it builds certain stack of buffs, if the Antimagic Shield crumbles you consume the stacks to gain manaburn damage to your attack for x turns, and every attack you land reduce your equilibrium.
- Also provide retaliatory manaburn

Silence:
- Applying Aura of Silence to creatures with arcane abilities replenishes user Equilibrium.

Manaclash:
- remove the equilibrium cost, make it generate equilibrium instead as you are destroying magic
- make it also increase paradox as it would be useful on a larger number of foes.
- Mana Clash could deactivate magical sustains or give spell fail chance for a few turns.
- remove X beneficial magical effects; act as an inverse Timeless on the target (increase duration of detrimental effects, decrease duration of beneficial effects)
- Drained Mana/Vim/etc from Mana Clash replenishes user Equilibrium.
- Reduce rare's resource pool to make it useful
- Having Mana Clash remove a percentage of the targets' resource pools
- have it scale up with target rank.
- doing fixed manadrain damage as currently with a percentage floor on the mana loss but not the damage.
- having it do a fair percentage or a significantly higher base value, whichever is lower.
- for the scenario where a boss is drained out of mana: give important bosses a new, passive talent that provides the super-fast resource regen, but only after 5 turns at near-empty resource levels
- Perhaps even add a crit-effect to Manaclash such that when it crits, it drains an additional % of CURRENT resource.
- make it give a percent of all damage as manaburn for a few turns, somewhat like the Mental Tirany prodigy.

General mechanism:
- Pulling most of the mindpower multipliers out of the antimagic tree for pure skill scaling would probably help a lot in making it less of a shoe in for the robed mindpower classes and less useless for the warriors and rogues. Or possibly max(mindpower, physpower) if something absolutely needs a power to scale properly.
- scaling the tree with spell save.
- to scaling the tree with spell save: It could be optional, so that spell save is used only if it provides an improvement to the mindpower-calculated numbers.
- a simple 'Eschewing all arcane powers bring you closer to nature. Regenerate X equilibrium per turn per point spent in antimagic'.
- finish off the utility of the anti-magic tree this way: each skill point added (obviously up to 20) in the category grants anti-magic shield a 1% chance of absorbing ALL damage from a magic attack without the shield going down but still increasing the equilibrium

New talent:
- a new talent sort of like stone alchemy that involved destroying arcane items or surrendering them to Zigur? I don't know if it would be better if destroying the item gave equilibrium/gold/energy directly, or if it gave you some item you could use (crystallized antimagic? Auntie Zig's Herbal Remedy?) vaguely like alchemist's gems. Pro: makes destroying magic items a basic part of being antimagic, instead of using them for Capitalism like everybody else; explains why ziguranth patrols are always carrying arcane items. Con: adds consumable items back to the game; everything but runes would weigh you the hell down.
- Urkis quest gives an alternative reward, which is a prodigy-like passive which makes enemies' spellpower scale with their remaining mana, so your enemies have weaker offensives as you burn away their mana.

Urkis quest reward (Not related to antimagic/manaburn):
- have a choice of reward for zigur quest getting fungus for every antimagic user is rather boring. Solipsist's feedback generic tree would be a nice powerful substitute even if hard to explain... Something like permanent +10(or whatever that looks balanced) to every attribute is fun, to. +X levels to random wyrmic breath attack is interesting for every character with high strength and no good ranged options. Or free spell feedback\draconic body\draconic will prodigy. Or something else. Zigur could give many interesting things in place for fungus allowing interesting builds for a price

[darkgod]

Much thanks for summarizing!
And thanks to you, AM got buffed
For now:

Aura of Silence now also restores equilibrium for each foes silenced
Antimagic Shield max absorb buffed and now does a manaburn backlask against the attacker
Mana Clash now also adds a timed effect that adds manaburn to all damage dealt
Resolve now works even while Antimagic Shield is up when at level 5
Antimagic now scales with either Mindpower of Physical power
Antimagic Shield now has a visual effect

I'm pondering alternate rewards for urkis, feedback sounds fun but it's already an escort reward. And giving a prodigy feels too much

[anonymous000]

All hail the darkgod!!

[Frumple]

I'm pondering alternate rewards for urkis, feedback sounds fun but it's already an escort reward. And giving a prodigy feels too much

Give the player a shroombuddy instead of fungus/talent access. Time hound style entity (though probably just a single one out at a time) that costs either nothing or a bit of EQ to sustain, and automatically respawns after death (fungus tree procs and/or infusion use making it faster). Pop on a few interesting unique talents -- reactive poisonous spores (percentile proc when hit, or put on a CD when it triggers), passive auto-spread a randomizing moss, improve fungus and/or infusions in some odd way when it's alive,* some sort of movement/rush ability (and/or probably link its base movement to either your base or current, so it won't screw around halfway across the level because you've got wanderer's rest on or somethin'), add a temporal hound style takes-few-turns-to-die (something like a shorter duration effect compared to the hounds, but let it extend a bit if you use infusions/fungus talent effects while it's dying) thing so you always get some value out of it, no one turn deletion nonsense. Some kind of taunt (make it single target and damaging/debuffing, to differentiate from the current mostly-AoE-and-no-other-effect taunts) to make sure things pay attention to it. Let it eventually pick up some overt AM effects (spell feedback/mana clash/eyal's wrath, choose one**) in the 40-50 level range. Don't give it much straight-up offensive ability (bump damage, etc.), but do have enough debuff/annoyance/utility/indirect damage to make it worth calling a reward.

Then you'd have something neat, considerably more interesting than some random generic tree, and useful to just about anyone (everyone loves something else drawing fire, doubly so if it can't die in one turn, and especially when it's cheerfully screwing with the enemy in the process), that still slots in with fungus thematically but isn't actually the tree. Could even take the fungus reward away entirely, leave it to make the current fungus users' access more unique while still having the reward specificly synergize with them.

Give zigur a murderhobo mushroom mascot, basically.

* Some sort of echo effect, where whenever something appropriate activates the shroombuddy does something. Spits out a tiny will o' wisp style suicide minishroom, I'unno.
** Alternately let it pick up unique poisonous spore and moss effects, that either add in antimagic themed options or add an antimagic effect of some sort of the current ones. It could even share the effect (when it's alive) if you happen to be an oozemancer (or have vile poisons, perhaps) yourself.

[ster]

Antimagic now scales with either Mindpower of Physical power

Can't wait for the AM AM AM runs


e: AM is at least worth considering now, the most dangerous rare+ in the game are sadly mindcasters but melees with no defenses like bulwark could still use new, unsavable silence and maybe new manaclash/AM shield. Though no one is going to have enough generics to make this work

e: e: i misread what was going to happen with urkis, IMO the reward should be finer energy manipulations if we're talking about full psionic powers (lol no). i have no really good ideas except wanting fungus to stop you from getting 1shot so easily

[Mordy]

I can't wait to avoid the new zigur patrols with their new constant manadrain powers!

Can we get energy drain resistance items now please? :p

[anonymous000]

Let me throw in my two cents on an alternative reward. The suggested reward is a response to certain issues:

- Provide an alternative way for players to gain the ability to disperse enemies' magical sustain. See http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=3 ... 1&start=15

- Make manaburn less of an all-or-nothing mechanism, and make it more useful against rares

The alternative reward "Witch Hunt" is an extra active talent which functions like Feed, and provides the following debuffs to the target

- Doubled resource cost for using a spell
- Target's spellpower scales with the proportion of remaining resource against max resource
- For every turn, there is a chance for a magical sustain to be removed. The chance scales with Physical Power/Mindpower (to side track a little bit: similar reward could be given for arcane class?)
- Player can always sense the target, regardless of line of sight or radius (just to add some more flavor to the talent)

But using this talent is very strenuous and it takes +x equilibrium per turn

[ster]

- Doubled resource cost for using spells
- Target's spellpower scales with the proportion of remaining resource against max resource
- For every turn, there is a chance for a magical sustain to be removed. The chance scales with Physical Power/Mindpower (to side track a little bit: similar reward could be given for arcane class?)
- Player can always sense the target, regardless of line of sight or radius (just to add some more flavor to the talent)

But using this talent is very strenuous and it takes +x equilibrium per turn

So basically you have to get spellhunt remnants or you're stuck with this as your sustain killer instead of picking up fungus?

[bpat]

Not digging the Witch Hunt idea either, since it isn't going to reliably help at all. Tbh with these changes Antimagic is already going to be ridiculous so there's not much need to give an alternate reward to Fungus, but here's a simple idea. Give a sustain similar to Mental Tyranny that converts 10% of your damage to manaburn (capped at 300 per turn) and also causes you to remove one magical sustain upon dealing manaburn damage once every 10 turns. Anything better than this would way too good and really this is probably borderline overpowered as well.

[HousePet]

I think this is really a good place for a 'wait and see how the incoming changes go' first.
To be honest, they kind of make Antimagic sound terrifying to be up against.

[ster]

I've already mentioned my thoughts on new antimagic on the discord but tbh i don't think this will make it a super polarising choice since ogre and shalore are still the best races, AM still takes a ridiculous amount of generic points to make it work (1/5/1/whatever AM and 5/1/1/0 Fungus is like the bare minimum to get a worthwhile investment), and it still denies you access to amazing fixedarts like Dakhtuns, Black Plate, Wrap of Stone, Aetherwalk and close to half the randarts in the game. Also spellhunt remnants only removes 1 sustain and is rarer than dispersion so you're pretty bad on that front too.


e: actually my assessment of AM skills was kind of bad, they only work against 1/5 of the Big Five rare+ types but lots of caster types are at least moderately dangerous....just less so than sawbutcher, summoner, solipsist and doomed.


Still, it's not going to ruin your character as badly on Normal/Nightmare/is worth some consideration on Insane and buffs oozemancer so we're at least making progress. Personally won't pick it since cool gear is all i play the game for and antimagic means good stuff is far rarer.

To be honest, they kind of make Antimagic sound terrifying to be up against.

Basically nothing has changed with enemy antimagic except you have to kite them for a few turns after mana clash so you don't get burned to 0 after recovering, and i guess AM shield absorbs a bit more now. Oozemancer rare+ are a lot scarier to characters that need to be right next to them anyway and other than those there's only 2 base types of enemy with mana clash and neither are likely to appear as unique+ outside of High Peak anyway

[HousePet]

I don't play games to kite.
If I want to kite, there is one in my cupboard...